In the 1840s, New England abolitionists believed in an ideal…
They founded the Northampton Association of Education and Industry (NAEI) to manufacture silk cloth as an alternative to slave-grown cotton.
“The Community,” as it was known, made Florence not only a stop on the Underground Railroad, but for some, an end destination. Sojourner Truth, David Ruggles and many lesser known abolitionists black and white lived and worked at the NAEI. Frederick Douglass felt a strong connection with the community, and William Lloyd Garrison was a frequent visitor.
While the experiment lasted only four years, its history raises the nation’s greatest questions of the day: what it meant to be truly equal, how to survive economically in an industrializing society, and how to pursue the ideals of democratic governance.
In the 1990s, Historic Northampton Museum received 75 letters, along with artifacts, from the descendants of James and Dolly Stetson, a family that lived at the NAEI. These documents and objects are the rich trove of primary sources around which the Radical Equality exhibit is built.
More than 70 historic pictures, maps, letters, newspaper articles, speeches, book excerpts, advertisements, and other materials bring to life the local personalities and national dilemmas, complex questions and everyday situations experienced by the Stetson family and their community.
Video and hands-on exhibits animate key characters, places, and concepts in ways that are grounded in scholarly research and tied to essential themes in traditional American history.
Radical Equality includes sections for both elementary and high school classrooms. The “Struggle for Freedom” segment, for grades 3 to 7, introduces the interlinked histories of slavery, industrialization, and the abolition movement, as well as the concepts of primary and secondary sources in history. “Communitarian Experiment,” for grades 8 to 12, offers more more advanced information and questions about motivations for social change, how reformers’ different goals may overlap or conflict, and how local communities relate to national movements.