She used a slip of paper from the lamp company-a warranty on its wares-to pencil the poem “Oh give it Motion-deck it sweet.” It is not the one she used while often writing about light and vision, but she likely owned the maker’s products. A sienna paisley shawl worn by Dickinson is folded atop her mahogany sleigh bed- one of her poems lists creasing her shawls among “Life’s little duties.” On a replica of her cherry worktable, a cylindrical oil tank is attached to a silver-plated lamp from the early 1880s, manufactured by the German Student Lamp Company. Roses and flowering vines course through the room’s new wallpaper, which Connecticut-based conservator Marylou Davis based on sooty fragments found near the ceiling.
The Belle of Amherst’s bedroom is still equipped with her black cast-iron stove, ornamented with Ionic pilasters. The parlor walls, which Martha remembered as “white with large figures,” have creamy cartouche motifs printed by Adelphi Paper Hangings in upstate New York, modeled after 1850s originals at the Farnsworth Homestead in Rockland, Maine.Įnglish porcelain cups used by Dickinsons, austere white with gold rims, are on display in the parlor near the family’s etched cranberry glass sherry set-placed as a nod to Emily’s comparison of her lustrous dark eyes to “the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves.” Visitors are encouraged to play the parlor’s recently donated mid-nineteenth-century piano, made by Hallet, Davis, and Company, the Boston manufacturer of Emily’s instrument (which is on view at Harvard’s Houghton Library). Crispin photograph.įor the parlor, the British firm Grosvenor Wilton supplied a new floral carpet in purples and blues, based on one of the company’s 1840s patterns. West bedroom at the Homestead, used by Dickinson. The Parkes’ whitewashed colonial revival staircase contained much original wood, and a snaking new walnut banister rests on turned balusters that once brushed against Emily’s signature white gowns. The Dickinsons’ front door, with Eastlake bronze hardware incised with palm-frond and fretwork patterns, has been retrieved from a garage. The family dismantled the ground-floor conservatory where Emily grew heliotropes and jasmine- Martha described the space as “a fairyland at all seasons”-but saved its twelve-over-twelve-pane windows, which now have been used to reconstruct the conservatory on its original footprint. The Parkes, in renovating the Homestead, re-used or tucked away historic architectural elements that have aided the recent restoration work. (Now closed for restoration, the Evergreens’ decor has changed little since Austin’s daughter Martha died in 1943.)
The museum, which opened in 2003, also includes the Evergreens, an Italianate villa that Emily’s brother Austin built next to his childhood home in the 1850s. It passed through the hands of just one non-Dickinson owner, the Parke family, before Amherst College acquired it in 1965. The poet’s gabled, cupola-topped house, known as the Homestead, was built in the early 1810s and expanded in phases thereafter.
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