Edna Greenwood and everyday life in early New England.

Although she is scarcely remembered today, Edna Greenwood (1888-1972) was a pioneer in the study of American material culture. At a remarkably early date she collected objects in an effort to understand their original purposes and the people who had made and used them. Her presentation of more than two thousand colonial New England objects to the Smithsonian Institution in 1949 became the cornerstone of an unprecedented exhibit of American material culture. At a time when other museums focused on the purely artistic or historical aspects of early American objects, the Smithsonian display introduced the notion of creating a context illustrating their original uses and environments.

The antiquarian movement of which Edna Hilburn Little Greenwood was a part arose during the second half of the nineteenth century. It was the result both of Americans' growing interest in their history and culture and of sweeping changes caused by the industrial revolution. The relentless advance of mechanization led to the disappearance of a way of life and of the material culture integral to it. This kindled in many people a desire to understand and preserve as much as possible before the past was entirely engulfed by the present. While historians and other professionals struggled to create a coherent account of the origins and growth of the United States, collectors gathered tangible "pieces of history" for a wide variety of reasons. Some collected objects associated with famous persons and some to establish (in their own minds, at least) a connection with the nation's old and distinguished families; and some out of a belief that preindustrial objects embodied humanistic values unavailable in machine-made articles. By the 1920s, collecting American antiques had become a popular middle-class pastime, and people often collected for no other reason than that it was fashionable to do so. Only a few, like Edna Greenwood, her mentor the antiquarian George Francis Dow (1868-1936), her protege Nina Fletcher Little (1903-1993), and her young friend C. Malcolm Watkins (1911-2001) collected in an attempt to reconstruct the logic of people long dead by looking seriously at their objects. (1)

By 1925, when she acquired Time Stone Farm and her collecting reached its zenith, Greenwood had become so obsessed with antique objects and books that they usually took precedence over all other aspects of her life. A friend once wrote that "Edna loved with a deep fierce love each item in her collection almost as a mother loves a child." (2) Yet she never joined the collectors' clubs that formed in Boston in the 1920s, never wrote for publication, and rarely opened her home to organized groups. (3) She preferred to study and to search out treasures on her own or with a companion. Her influence until late in life, when she made the gift to the Smithsonian Institution, was limited to friends and acquaintances who shared her interests. Wealthy decorative arts collectors like Henry Francis du Pont, Francis Garvan, Electra Havemeyer Webb, and Ima Hogg were all Greenwood's contemporaries, but they inhabited a very different world from hers. While they spent record-setting sums at high-profile New York City antiques shops, auctions, and shows, she took pride in patronizing unpretentious country dealers and oldfashioned "vendues," or auctions.

Looking back over her collecting career in 1951, Greenwood told a newspaper reporter that it had begun when she went to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1907 and

became interested in exploring the hill country behind the little college town of Northampton, Mass., and in attending farm sales, or dues," as they were called. This was the time when New England farm families were giving up the struggle to make a living from barren fields and were selling out wholesale to immigrants coming in a great tide from Europe. Attics and cellars that had been undisturbed for generations were being cleaned out and many a strange old piece of household furnishing was coming to light. (4)

Alice Winchester (1907-1997), the longtime editor of The Magazine ANTIQUES, once recalled Greenwood's great curiosity about New England's "old folks" and speculated that she probably first ventured into the countryside in search of such individuals. (5) Greenwood's collecting activities were very likely a by-product of these visits to descendants of early settlers, whom she ...