Charles Phelps Jr.

Charles Phelps Jr's Ink Stand

Charles Phelps Jr. was born in Hadley, Massachusetts, in August 1743. Although Charles was not formally educated, he became a successful and prominent Hadley community figure. In the late 1760s, Charles was hired by Elizabeth Pitkin Porter to manage the Forty Acres farmstead. Despite the Porter family's skepticism about young Elizabeth's desire to marry a man who did not own property himself, Elizabeth Porter and Charles Phelps married on June 14, 1770. He went to live with his wife and mother-in-law and took over the management of the family estate at Forty Acres.  A mark of Charles' rising status and ambitions, in the months before his marriage, Charles purchased a fine carriage and an enslaved man named Cesar.

Immediately after his marriage, Charles began expanding and improving the house and farm. He added a two-story kitchen ell in 1771. In 1782, he built a large barn and, in the 1790s, added a large work kitchen for the farm's burgeoning cheese business, another family kitchen, and a chaise house. According to family tradition, he was a self-taught architect and may have planned many of these improvements himself. By his death, he had dramatically altered the house and reportedly enlarged the farm to nearly a thousand acres. This affluent household was supported by the labors of five people enslaved to the family: Cesar Phelps, Peg Bowen, who had helped raise Elizabeth and who Elizabeth inherited from her parents, and Peg's two daughters and granddaughter, born into slavery on the farmstead. Charles also profited from and oversaw the labor of two indentured servants, several apprentices, and numerous seasonal farm hands.

Charles and Elizabeth Phelps would have two children who lived past infancy: Moses Charles Porter Phelps and Elizabeth Whiting Phelps (Huntington). They also adopted a baby girl, Thankful Richmond (Hitchcock).

Charles Phelps trained in the law and became increasingly politically active in the town and Commonwealth.  As a representative for Hadley in the Massachusetts Legislature, he was often away from home on trips to Boston. He served the following terms: 1791-94, 1795-96, 1798-99, 1807-08. Phelps was also Squire of the town of Hadley, deacon of the church, and chairman of the building committee for the new church in 1808. From 1781 until his death, Charles was a Trustee of Hopkins Academy. He was also an early member of the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Agriculture and the Humane Society.

After suffering declining health for many months, Charles Phelps died at his home in Hadley in 1814.