Hatfield Historical Museum

10/13/2026

Thanks to the 40 folks who came out on Saturday for our last program of 2026, on early gravestones in the Hill Cemetery, including a large number of Revolutionary War veterans. It was such perfect weather for a walk in the graveyard, with scholar Bob Drinkwater providing plenty of fascinating information, that the program ran a full hour over! The oldest stone is hard to spot, tucked near one of the large "table" monuments, and the most recent is in the Coles/Cowles family plot right near the road.

10/13/2026

Our neighbors up the road in Sunderland have a program on offer that might be of interest!

Two days until Stephen Mikesell's Bridges of Franklin County program!

Please join us. Please share this post.

Amherst History Museum Historical Society of Greenfield Historic Deerfield Conway Historical Society Leverett History Montague MA Historical Society Northfield Historical Society, MA Whately Historical Society Hadley Historical Society Hatfield Historical Museum

10/05/2026

It's October! What does that mean in the museum? It means there are only 4 Tuesdays left of our official open hours! It also means we are starting to plan the new exhibit for next year, which means one of the current exhibits will be coming down.

The “Booze, Schmooze and News: Remembering Hatfield Taverns and Clubs” exhibit was put up in Dec 2019, and is full of Hatfield social life at bars and taverns from the 1670s to the 1970s. Come over at 1:30 PM on a Tuesday and see it before it goes away!

Below is the metal sign from the Hatfield Club advertising Jacob Ruppert's B**r and Ale, which once hung in the Hatfield Club, donated by Carol Benson.

09/28/2026

Thanks everyone for your great guesses! The item in question is a bar-keeper's towel holder, still available today for any number of kitchen supply stores. You secure the clamp to a fixed point, then you can easily flick the towel upward into the clamp, then it holds it in place until you grab it again.

At various times in the past, the records listed it as: Victorian candle-snuffer, sugar-tongs, or over-skirt lifter. This points to three common issues to watch for in museum work.

First, sometimes items, especially kitchen items, are so well-known in their time that the details of what the thing is don't get recorded.

Second, the inherent bias of the people looking at an item without context can lead to mis-identification! I have a strong textile lens, and I knew it wasn't sugar-tongs, so the "skirt-lifter" was my guess.

Third, sometimes when an item has what's called a "finished" design, where there have been no major changes in it's design and function in 100 years, it can be, counter-intuitively, harder to track down what it is.

Thanks for your Citizen Historian help!

09/09/2026

WITHOUT any image searching or etc, what do you think this is??

Sometimes items in museum collections don't arrive with a lot of details. Often this means the item was so common the original donor figured everyone would always know what it was. Do you?

09/08/2026

The long weekend is over and it's back to school!!
Who remembers this clock from the Center School?
How early did you get up in order to be to class on time?

08/31/2026

The digital copy of the Henry J. Billings "Map of Early Hatfield Deeds" is now up on our website, and you can zoom in all you want! https://hatfieldhistory.weebly.com/collections.html also has links to other digital collections - check them out!