Hutchinson Family Singers, 1845 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Sources
Important primary sources include the collection at the Wadleigh Memorial Public Library in Milford, New Hampshire and Dale Cockrell’s  Excelsior: Journals of the Hutchinson Family Singers, 1842-1846 (1989). In addition, Joshua Hutchinson published A Brief Narrative of the Hutchinson Family in 1874 and John Hutchinson recalled his experiences in The Story of the Hutchinsons in 1896  (Vol. 1 ; Vol. 2). While Joshua’s work offers “intimate vignettes” of the singers, historian Scott E. Gac cautions that John Hutchinson’s “memoir… is a less accurate but entertaining reconstruction of the group.” In addition, a collection at the Wadleigh Memorial Public Library in Milford, New Hampshire has sheet music and newspaper clippings about the Hutchinsons. Important secondary sources include Philip D. Jordan’s Singin’ Yankees (1946), Carol Brink’s Harps in the Wind: The Story of the Singing Hutchinsons (1947), Caroline Moseley’s “The Hutchinson Family: The Function of their Song in Ante-Bellum America,” Journal of American Culture 1, no. 4 (1978): 713-23, Scott Gac’s Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reform (2007), and Matthew Warner Osborn’s “Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Antebellum Reform,” Journal of the Early Republic 28 (2008): 488-491.

Places to Visit
Apparently no structures or sites related to the Hutchinson Family Singers exist. Jesse and Mary Hutchinson were from Milford, New Hampshire. Thirteen of their children formed the original Hutchinson Family Singers.

Images
A 1845 photograph of the Hutchinson Family Singers is available from the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other images are in House Divided and in the collection at the Wadleigh Memorial Public Library in Milford, New Hampshire.