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Sunday, April 4, 2010

Happy Easter from Happy Valley...

I just returned from visiting my kids in Happy Valley, Pennsylvania, the region around the town of State College.  Nobody seems to know why this area is called Happy Valley but the town does seem to "talk the talk"....





A little closer to home, here are a few more pics from Pioneer Valley, in western Massachusetts.  Specifically, these are 19th century tobacco barns near Deerfield.  In the 1860's, Deerfield was the leading grower of tobacco in the nation ---- this old wood seems almost spiritual.





All the door panels are thrown open when the tobacco leaves are drying.



Finally, there is a new museum, the Flynt Center of Early New England Life in Deerfield that displays a large collection of 18th to early 20th century decorative arts.  Here is one piece to give you a flavor....it is a wool "bed rug" from the late 18th or early 19th century, in a Tree of Life pattern, based on 17th or 18th century Indian palampores.  What is interesting is that William Morris was inspired by the very same fabrics and patterns later in the 19th century (see this post here)......compare to his wallpaper pattern below.


What you see here is about five feet across.


Morris Pink and Rose wallpaper (1891)