About Historic Northampton
Historic Northampton Museum & Education Center
Our mission is to collect and preserve Northampton’s past and to explore the City’s history, its human-made landscape, and the natural world underlying and surrounding it.
Historic Northampton is a primary caretaker of artifacts and documents with strong connections to Northampton’s history that reveal histories of past residents. Research and explorations into the past are based upon these authentic, primary sources. Historic Northampton is dedicated to preserving and interpreting all aspects of Northampton’s rich and complicated history.
Founded in 1905, Historic Northampton is a non-profit 501c3 organization independent of city government.
The Properties
Located on two park-like acres near downtown, we maintain four historic buildings:
- Parsons House (1719)
- Shepherd House (1798)
- Shepherd Barn (1805)
- Damon House (1813)
The three properties were donated to Historic Northampton (then known as the Northampton Historical Society) by three neighbors between 1923 and 1969. In 2001, all three houses and the barn were added to the National Register of Historic Places as the Parsons, Shepherd, and Damon Houses Historic District.
In addition to a local history archive and an exhibit gallery with changing exhibits, we hold 40,000 objects that span from everyday household items to a historic clothing collection of national significance.
We offer 100 programs each year, held on-site, in neighborhoods, cemeteries, and conservation areas, as well as over Zoom. The newly restored Shepherd Barn is a performance venue for plays, concerts, and dances. As a community-centered museum, we regularly partner with schools and other organizations.
Acknowledging Indigenous History
Here, we acknowledge that we stand on Indigenous land, inhabited by Native American people for roughly 11,000 years, since the glaciers receded. This place that we now call Northampton was known to Native people as Nonotuck or Norwottuck. Nonotuck homelands stretched across both sides of the Kwinitekw (now called the Connecticut River), including the present-day towns of Amherst, Hadley, Hatfield, South Hadley, Northampton, and Easthampton.
Nonotuck people were closely connected, through trade, diplomacy, and kinship, to other Native communities in the region: the Quaboag in present-day Brookfield; the Agawam in present-day Springfield; the Woronoco in present-day Westfield; the Pocumtuck in present-day Deerfield; and the Sokoki in present-day Northfield. During the early 1600s, these Native groups engaged in reciprocal trade relations with English colonial settlers and with other Native nations.
By the late 1600s, however, the pressures of colonial warfare forced many Native families to relocate, taking shelter in other Native territories. We offer condolences for the Nonotuck people who were forced to leave their homeland, while also offering gratitude for the Native communities that took them in.
Despite the loss of land due to colonial settlement, a number of Native nations have persisted across the territory that we now call “New England.” These include: the Nipmuc to the East; the Wampanoag and Narragansett to the Southeast; the Mohegan, Pequot, and Schaghticoke to the South; the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican to the West; and the Abenaki to the North, among others. Recognizing that the entirety of the North American continent constitutes Indigenous homelands, we affirm, honor, and respect the sovereignty of these and hundreds of other Indigenous Native American and First Nations peoples who survive today.
Learn more about Native Histories in Nonotuck.