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"Barrs Homestead 1739"

(c) Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield MA. All rights reserved.
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Eliza Allen Starr (1824-1901) was born in Deerfield, Massachusetts. She was sent to Boston at age thirteen to finish her education. When she was twenty-one, she opened her own studio, but she found the climate unhealthy and moved to Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Natchez, Mississippi, returning to Brooklyn by 1853. The next year, after a long spiritual struggle, she converted to Catholicism. It was as a Catholic author and illustrator that Starr gained her greatest fame, writing "Pilgrims and Shrines" (1881), "Christian Art in Our Own Age" (1891), and "Three Archangels and Angels in Art" (1899), among others. She lived in Chicago until the Great Fire of 1871, which consumed her studio; after, she was asked to create an Art Department for St. Mary's College in Indiana. Her niece was Ellen Gates Starr (1859-1940), whose work with Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago led her into a lifetime of reform work. Eliza Starr may have been influential in Ellen Starr's conversion, in 1920, to Catholicism. <BR> <BR>This view is of her family's old homestead at The Bars, a district of Deerfield, Massachusetts, so called because it used long logs, or bars, for fencing around its fields in the early eighteenth century.

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