Dear Friend,

In April 2025 the Trump administration canceled our contract, in its entirety, for $300,000 in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to complete the already prototyped website: Lucy Terry Prince: African American Experiences in Early Rural New England. In December 2024, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA) was awarded this grant as part of the 2025 Congressionally approved federal budget towards completion of the $434,552 website.

Click here to see the prototype.

The email from the acting chairman for NEH included these statements without further explanation: “Your grant no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities…” and “immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interest of the federal government…”  

To help us fight this censorship, please donate to PVMA and forward this message to your friends and family.

Click here to see the prototype.

The Lucy Terry Prince: African American Experiences in Early Rural New England.website is the culmination of PVMA's investment in a twenty-year long project to tell the story of Lucy Terry who was enslaved in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Her life, when contextualized, illuminates the truths of the lives of enslaved and free people of African origin during the Colonial Period through the Revolutionary War and the Early National Period. The prototype and supporting application received NEH’s highest scoring for scholarly excellence and its production plan.

Partnerships with federal government agencies in our field are on hold indefinitely, perhaps for years, so finding replacement funding is very difficult.

If you want PVMA to continue to tell the true yet untold stories of our history, donate and forward this message to your friends and family.

Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield, MA, is a vibrant regional 501(c)(3) non-profit, maintaining Memorial Hall Museum, a research Library, Deerfield Teachers’ Center, Indian House Children’s Museum, several websites, and Community Outreach projects.

PVMA, incorporated in Massachusetts in 1870, purposely chooses to remember and honor the Pocumtuck People and their homeland with the organization’s legal name.

Your generous gift will help continue PVMA’s important work sharing the many and varied untold stories of the Connecticut River Valley inhabitants. We continue to strengthen our education, museum, public and on-line programs; working hard to convey the complex multiple perspectives of our shared history.

View our website at deerfield-ma.org for updates on events, past programming, annual reports, ect.