Wistariahurst: The House That Survived the Flood
Near Springfield, Massachusetts
The house with the wisteria vines in Holyoke came here by way of disaster.
William Skinner arrived in the United States from England in eighteen forty-five, already trained in the silk trade. He eventually established mills in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, a village in the hills above Northampton, and built himself a substantial house there in eighteen sixty-eight. He named it Wistariahurst for the wisteria that cascaded across its eastern facade. The mills thrived. Skinner became one of the most prominent silk manufacturers in New England, his satins sold nationally under his own name.
On May sixteenth, eighteen seventy-four, the Williamsburg Reservoir dam failed. The flood killed one hundred thirty-nine people and destroyed most of the village below, including Skinner's mills. The catastrophe might have ended his business. Instead Skinner made a calculation: the industrial city of Holyoke, recently built on an engineered canal system along the Connecticut River, offered infrastructure, water power, and a labor supply that Williamsburg never could. He moved both his factory and his house.
The house, a substantial Victorian structure, was relocated to Holyoke intact, no small undertaking in eighteen seventy-four. Skinner rebuilt his mills in the new city and resumed manufacturing. By the time of his death in nineteen oh-two, William Skinner and Sons employed over one thousand people and generated millions of dollars in annual revenue.
The Skinner family retained Wistariahurst until nineteen fifty-nine, when Katharine Skinner Kilborne, William's youngest daughter, and her heirs donated it to the City of Holyoke for educational and cultural use. It has operated as a museum since then, preserving the parlors, woodwork, and furnishings of a silk manufacturer's family across four generations.
Holyoke itself was for a time among the most productive industrial cities in New England. The canal system that drew Skinner here in eighteen seventy-four is still visible today, and the brick mill buildings along the waterways tell the same story Wistariahurst tells in wood and wisteria.
