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Collections

“We don’t collect objects, we collect stories.”

The collection in Memorial Hall Museum differs from those of most other museums. All objects are collected strictly for their artistic and historic merit, with no regard for their monetary values or physical conditions. This was the intent of the museum’s founder, George Sheldon. It has been followed ever since.

As a result, the collection is extremely unique and features items found nowhere else. Many have obvious historic significance. Some are utterly commonplace and offer an understanding of a time, place, or person that might otherwise have been lost to history. And a few are just plain bizarre.

The collection, spread between Memorial Hall Museum and the PVMA Library, numbers over 50,000 objects, photographs, documents, and manuscripts. It spans pre-contact Indigenous artifacts through contemporary items. Each was made, used, and/or owned locally. Individually, each tells a unique story. Together, they tell the story of the area and its people across time.

Searching the Collection

The searchable collections database is available here:

Highlights of the collection, as well as related educational resources, are available on the American Centuries website.

To request in-person research access, please contact the curator or the librarian for documents and manuscripts.

Object Donations

Memorial Hall Museum is actively collecting the art, history, and culture of the northern Pioneer Valley. If you are interested in making a donation to the collection, please contact our curator.

PVMA Library

The Library houses PVMA’s extensive collection of three centuries of reading fare—literature, sermons, history, travel, biography, periodicals, and works on agriculture, animal husbandry, and domestic economy—many of which exist in rare imprints. This includes:

• Over 600 account books and daybooks of local origin, ranging in date from the late 17th to the mid-20th century. Kept by merchants, professionals, farmers, craftsmen, and business firms, these ledgers yield valuable material for studies in economic and local history.
• Finding aids to the most extensive collections of family papers are available here:

Sermons documenting the work of various local ministers, occasionally in considerable depth. Records of churches in Deer- field and surrounding towns have also been preserved.

More than 200 diaries which provide an intimate and often detailed view of life in an earlier day. Represented are the writings of 90 men, women, and children who recorded their personal and family concerns, and their activities as farmers, politicians, artists, physicians, ministers, craftsmen, and travelers.

Records of voluntary societies in Deerfield and surrounding towns. An extensive miscellany of 17th- to 19th-century Deerfield town records and documents from other western Massachusetts towns provide additional research opportunities.

Researching in the Library

The PVMA library, part of the Memorial Libraries (the PVMA library and Historic Deerfield library) is open year-round, Tuesday through Friday 9 am–12pm and 1–5 pm; closed Mondays and holidays. From April through November 2024, the library will also be open the first Saturday of the month, 9 am-12 pm, 1-5 pm.

For all inquiries, please call 413-775-7125 or email library@deerfieldmuseum.org.

Library Donations

The PVMA is actively collecting the written record of the northern Pioneer Valley. If you are interested in donating an item, or items, to the library, please contact our librarian.

Education

To support the teaching of American history, the Deerfield Teachers’ Center offers a rich and varied professional development program for K-12 teachers, Traveling History Kits for loan, field trips, and in-school History Labs.

The programs at the Deerfield Teachers’ Center use award-winning websites, with online educational materials, created in collaboration with classroom teachers— making our collection and educational resources accessible to educators nation-wide.