Elizabeth Porter Phelps

Elizabeth Porter Phelp's Diary

Elizabeth was born in 1747, the only child of Moses and Elizabeth Porter. At the age of five, her family moved from the stockaded center of Hadley to the new house built by her father in 1752. Only three years later, her father was killed fighting in the French and Indian War. Elizabeth (also called Betty, Bette, or Betsy) continued to live on the "Forty Acres" farm outside of town with her widowed mother but under the watchful eye of her father's family in Hadley.

In 1768, a man named Charles Phelps was hired to manage the farm. Elizabeth mentions this casually in her diary, but there is no further mention of him until the preparations for their marriage began. The two were married on June 14, 1770. Charles moved into the house with Elizabeth and her mother and took charge of the farm.

Elizabeth was very active socially and seems to have entertained guests at her house almost continuously. She acted as a midwife and ministered to the sick in the community. Along with several servant girls, the enslaved woman Peg Bowen who had helped to raise her, and Peg's daughters and granddaughter, also enslaved to the Phelps family, Elizabeth Phelps carried out the household production of large quantities of soap, butter, and especially cheese. On this large farm, the women were sometimes feeding more than 20 farmhands in addition to the regular household members.

Elizabeth raised two children as well as a girl named Thankful Hitchcock, who she treated like a daughter. After her children had grown and moved away, the Phelps' grandchildren came frequently to spend extended periods of time on the farm at "Forty Acres," and in 1816 her daughter Elizabeth Whiting Phelps Huntington, and her husband and nine children came to live with her at Forty Acres. 

Elizabeth Porter Phelps had spent almost her entire life at Forty Acres. In 1765 she began keeping a diary or memorandum book, and she continued to write in it weekly up until the year of her death in 1817. It is the most detailed source of information about this place, and one of the best known sources of information about women's lives in rural New England during the 18th century.