USA > Massachusetts > Hampden County > Hampden county, 1636-1936, Volume II > Part 10
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The Connecticut River had borne considerable traffic between Hartford and the foot of South Hadley Falls, but the towns above were compelled to transport their merchandise partly, at least, by land, until in 1792 twenty men formed a group called "the Proprie- tors of the Locks and Canals on the Connecticut River." They built a canal which started where the South Hadley Falls end of the present great dam is located under a red sandstone bluff and extended north- ward along the river's trend two and one-half miles, where it opened into the river above a wing dam.
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The construction was placed in the hands of Benjamin Prescott, of Northampton, who had to use his own judgment and ingenuity to scale the falls, because the canal was the first in the country. He had no precedent to fall back on. Engineer Prescott built of stone, cov- ered with plank, a plane two hundred and thirty feet long, at an angle of thirteen and one-half degrees and extending from the guard lock at the end of the canal to a lock at the north of Buttery Brook. On each side of the upper end of the inclined plane was an overshot water- wheel, sixteen feet in diameter. These wheels were connected by a shaft on which was wound a strong chain attached to a carriage. The carriage was supported by three pairs of wheels of decreasing height to keep the floor of the carriage level. When a boat was to be let down the inclined plane it was floated onto the carriage and the wheels set in motion to unwind the chain. The force of the water turning the overshot wheels drew the boat carriage up again. This device, together with the canal with which it was linked, comprised one of the most novel water transportation systems ever developed.
The waterway was constructed for the accommodation of boats twenty feet wide and forty feet long, but after ten years of use increas- ing commerce compelled the deepening of the canal and an improved system of locks. At the lower end a man kept a powerful span of horses and four yokes of oxen constantly in waiting to tow up the canal all boats whose owners paid the required toll.
A swing ferry was the means of communication between Ireland Parish and Canal Village, and from the west bank a county road went along up Money Hole Hill to Northampton Street. The canal around the falls gave a great impulse to river traffic and the growth of towns on the river. The vast body of water coursing its foamy way down the Hadley rapids was unused on the west side of the river except by a community gristmill and a cotton mill built in 1831 by the old Had- ley Falls Company. One of the finest waterpowers in the country was here running to waste. The great volume of water, the rapid fall of sixty feet, the rocky ledge underlying the stream and flanked by walls of solid stone whereon to locate a dam, the convenient site for canals and mills, encircled on the three sides by the graceful sweep and steady, unfailing flow of the "Great River" had long attracted the attention of capitalists.
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It is claimed that no land in the world is more productive, or could be made more productive, than the bottom lands of the Connecticut, and no valley is more abundant in natural resources for mechanical and manufacturing enterprises. Holyoke alone has waterpower enough, if used, to support 100,000 persons, while up and down the valley are numerous other available sources of waterpower as yet only partly used.
At this date twenty-two houses were scattered on the "fields" and one hundred and eight dwellings held the remaining population of the parish. By the end of the next decade stage routes and river navi- gation faced the destructive competition of the Connecticut River Railroad.
Soon after this event capitalists visited the falls and with great secrecy made plans for the construction of a dam across the river and the purchase of all the land on either side of the river necessary to the proper development of a great manufacturing city. They engaged as their agent George C. Ewing, a salesman for the Fairbanks Scale Company of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, who in his journeyings up and down the valley had acquired considerable familiarity with the region. He became impressed with the idea that at the South Hadley Falls was one of the largest available waterpowers in the country going to waste and shortly had bought up for them 1, 100 acres of land on the present site of Holyoke. The total number of acres was afterward increased to 1,500. Large prices were paid for the land, if viewed from a farming standpoint, which had previously been the land's only claim to worth; but from a manufacturing standpoint the prices were extremely moderate. Five thousand dollars, at the time the dam was completed, would have bought fifty acres right in the best part of the present city. Most of the farmers were ready enough to sell at the prices offered, but some consented one day and repented the next, thinking they might get higher prices. The only one with whom any trouble was had was Sam Ely, who had an eighty-acre farm on the river side some distance below the proposed dam. Half he sold, but the rest he clung to. He was an old-fashioned farmer, who had an antipathy to innovations, and he wished to keep the old homestead on which he had been brought up and where he had always lived. Besides, he said he didn't want to see the corporations control every- thing and he was sorry they had come there. "He didn't s'pose he
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could raise nothing now ; it'd all be stolen." But the company wanted the land and they kept after him. "Uncle" John Chase was their emissary in this matter. Finally, Sam Ely got sick of the harassing and one day seeing Uncle Chase approaching on his usual errand, he raised his chamber window and poked the muzzle of his old gun over the sash and warned Uncle Chase to come no nearer or he would shoot. Uncle Chase thought this an idle threat and kept right on and Ely pulled the trigger. The musket was heavily loaded and the discharge was quite startling. The visitor was not hurt, but he was well scared and made haste to retreat. This event was the sensation of the town for some time. There was talk of arresting Ely, but this was not considered politic, as anything that disturbed him would but put off the day of securing the land. The wisdom of this course was proved when a little later the desired transfer was made.
Meanwhile the Boston company went ahead and work on the dam at once commenced. This project of constructing a dam on the great rapids, which should withstand the powerful current of the Connecti- cut River and afford motive power for a new city of mills and shops, was so gigantic and the capital to be invested was so large for those days, that the undertaking was famous from its inception and still ranks among the foremost manufacturing enterprises of the world.
Mr. Ewing had charge of hiring the men for work on the dam and employed several hundred at eighty cents a day, but the contractors who were building the canal reduced their wages to seventy cents a day. The directors instructed Mr. Ewing to do the same, so he paid the difference to some of his men out of his own pocket. In order to complete the work that year it was planned to work the men on Sun- days, so Mr. Ewing resigned, as he believed it "contrary to the laws of God and man." The people of the vicinity appreciated his char- acter and not long after sent him to the Legislature. He was subse- quently superintendent of schools and did much to lay out the city and improve its appearance.
On January 1, 1848, there was a general strike among the men employed in the preliminary work pertaining to the dam. When twenty of the strikers went back to work, hundreds of rioters gathered around the workers and mobbed them. Several residents and engi- neers who tried to interfere were injured and had to be carried off
Hampden --- 43
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the field. The militia and twenty-five artillerymen from Northamp- ton were called in, but came too late to be of service.
When the dam was completed and a day was set for testing it, crowds of people came from all the country about to observe this new marvel whose estimated waterpower would furnish employment for 100,000 persons. It had much the appearance of the rude horse sheds we see behind the country churches, being a hollow framework of timbers, with a roof slanting up-stream. There were those who scoffed at the new structure and one man drew a line on it with a bit of chalk and maintained that when the water rose to that point the whole thing would give way. Others maintained that it was as stable as the rock beneath, and one excited citizen declared that "God Almighty couldn't sweep it away." The gates were closed in the morning and many people, as the waters slowly rose, walked back and forth on the top of the dam, or jumped about on the dry rocks of the river bed below. But in the afternoon the dam sprang a leak and the people were warned back to the banks. Brush and gravel were thrown on the places that were leaking the worst, but as the water slowly came up higher and higher the strain upon the dam was so great that the water came through in large quantities. Then it was seen that the massive stone bulkhead at the west side showed signs of weakening. It was evidently going to tip over. In case it did, the vast body of water collecting above would sweep through the village below and destroy everything in its path. Quantities of railroad iron were brought and piled upon the bulkhead in great haste, but while this work was going on there was a crack in mid-stream and the whole dam, save a little at each shore, was seen tipping over and crumbling before the pent-up waters of the river. A mighty wave rushed and roared over the ragged rocks of the river bed and spent itself far below on the South Hadley shore. The water was full of broken timbers, tossing about in the surging torrent, and these seemed to the eyes of the excited crowds on shore to be struggling human beings. It was a terrible sight.
Those who saw it say that the front of the rushing waters was a wall, high at the start, but becoming less as the released water went down stream. There was a ferry some distance below the dam and when the ferryboat was struck by the water it was like an egg shell
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upon its bosom. The boat was carried three or four miles and stranded on the shore.
While the pond was filling a man interested in the company was telegraphing at intervals to some of the property owners in Boston concerning progress. His telegrams read about as follows, the last one being verbatim: "10 A. M., the gates were just closed and the water is filling behind the dam." "12 m., the dam is leaking badly." "I P. M., we cannot stop the leaking." "2 P. M., the stones of the bulkhead are giving away." "3.20 P. M., your old dam has gone to hell by way of Willimansett."
Every house in the village on the Holyoke banks was emptied of its occupants and for the moment each who had friends or relatives among the laborers were sure they were lost. Women wrung their hands and wept and shrieked. "Mikey's gone, Mikey's gone!" one would cry. "Oh, I shall never see John any more !" sobbed another, while the exclamation of still another is remembered to have run in this wise: "Oh, my husband is in there! He's in there, and me with my seven children-what am I going to do ?" The stream seemed full of men and everybody thought they had some friend drowned there. But the waters gradually subsided, friends were found all safe and peace was restored. The flow of water from above having been stopped by the closing of the gates in the morning, the water had pretty much run out from the channel below, leaving the river very shallow and slow; so when toward evening, a sudden, muddy flood filled with timbers and débris, came sweeping down from the north, the towns and villages were filled with alarm and curiosity and each farmer made haste to hitch his horse into his wagon and take the up-valley road to examine into the cause. A telegram was sent to Springfield informing them that there was a "big freshet coming" and the railroad did a heavy business that evening bringing up the sightseers.
This disaster was a hard blow to the company which built the dam, but they went to work at once on a new one. If the first attempt had not brought success it had at least given valuable experience. The new structure was made immensely massive and solid. The wreck of the old dam was cleared from the banks and two coffer dams were built, one on each side of the river, each of which extended two hun- dred feet from the bank into the stream. The water was pumped out
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of these coffer dams and the rock was excavated to a depth of six feet. The construction of the main dam was then begun by laying down three fifteen-inch square timbers lengthwise across the river with their upper surface inclined at an angle of twenty-one degrees. The rock below was cut to give them a proper bearing and then the sticks were bolted to the rocks with iron bolts, 3,000 of them being used for this purpose in the whole dam. In this way the dam was started in six-foot sections, which were tied to each other by twelve. inch sticks running across the river. There were one hundred and seventy of these sections. The structure above the foundation sticks was made up of alternate courses of these ties and rafters. Between the rafters short blocks were introduced to prevent bending, and at the splicings of the rafter longer pieces were put in. The foot of each rafter was bolted to the rock. The structure was thus reared to its full height and its up-stream surface covered with six-inch planks, except for a space of sixteen feet which was left open temporarily. The toe of the dam was secured by placing a second covering of plank at right angles to the first and bolted to the rock. Then the structure was filled solid with gravel. The crest of the dam was covered with boiler iron to protect it from the blows of driftwood and ice.
In this manner two hundred feet of the dam on each side of the river was completed, and as the summer advanced and the water became lower, two hundred feet more was done on each side, crowding the water into a space of two hundred and seventeen feet in the mid- dle of the stream. Then a higher coffer dam was thrown across the gap and the work went on to completion. Forty-six gates, each eighteen feet long, were constructed to close the openings left in the planking. All open spaces were closely packed with stone as well as gravel to a height of ten feet and the planking of the upper portion of the dam was eighteen inches of solid timber. The total cost of the structure was set down as $1 50,000.
When the dam was finished in 1849 the water fell perpendicularly over its crest, and its pounding could be heard for miles about. With the air just right the sound was audible as far away as Springfield. The water as it fell imparted to the earth a slight vibration that would set such windows and doors as were not perfectly tight into a clicking motion. You might see a man jump up in the midst of service in one of the churches and stick his pocketknife into some window that
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was keeping up an unchurchly rattling. Everything about a house that was the least bit loose was "a-shaking and a-clapping" and you could see the jarring motions of poles or sticks in the garden which were not very firmly set in the earth. It is said that one house rocked to such a degree that an old man who was in it was seasick and in another quaking house a man thought he had the shaking palsy. These results were rather astonishing to begin with, but the natives soon became used to them. "The dam was a great music-box" to be sure, but once having become accustomed to it the sensation on getting out of hearing of its roar was a curious one. The stillness was almost oppressive. "It seemed as if Sunday was come; it made one feel queer; you couldn't think what the matter was, there was such a dead silence."
A little four-foot apron projected from the crest of the dam and from this was suspended, some eight feet below, by iron rods, a plank walk on which one could pass beneath the sheet of water which was falling over the dam. Not many would aspire to this experience, as a walk on those slippery planks in the mists and sprays from the flying waters, and with such a roar in your ears that you could hardly hear yourself think, would not be enjoyable to the average individual. The logs and ice dropping over the dam soon demolished this walk and it was never rebuilt. During the filling of the pond the water below left the bed of the river, only a little remaining in hollows in the rocks. Many tools that had been lost in the work were then recovered and eels and fish were taken out of the pools by the handfuls.
There are several more or less tragic bits of history connected with the dam that are worth recording. Some time after the struc- ture was finished, three Irishmen were crossing the river in a boat, just above the fall, when an oar broke. The man rowing became confused and pulled furiously with the remaining oar, but that only served to turn the boat round and round. So the craft was dashed over the dam. But luckily the swift current below swept the men close by a great rock in mid-stream, which they managed to grasp and soon were ensconced safely on its top and yelling lustily for help. The cry was soon running through the town that there were three men over the dam and the crowds at once began to gather on the banks. The accident occurred just at the edge of evening on a cold day in autumn and the plight of the poor fellows out on the rock after their ducking
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was not enviable. Night settled gloomily down and bonfires were kindled on both banks to show the shipwrecked that those on shore were planning help. At the Falls and at Holyoke there then lived a number of the old river boatmen who were familiar with the stream and from long practice knew how to handle a boat with the greatest skill and dexterity. Four of these men, Isaac Hadley, Levi Dickinson, Sam Ely and Joseph Ely manned one of the old flatboats lying in dis- use at the ferry landing, poled it up along shore, crept cautiously out in the bit of water below the dam, which was a little less fierce than that below, took the three men from the rock and shot down through the rapids to safety. It was a desperate undertaking carried bravely through.
Not many years later the leader of these rescuers. Isaac Hadley, met his death here. Mr. Hadley was a sturdy, thick-set, powerfully- built man, a man greatly looked up to in the community, and a man of good judgment, who could always be depended on. He had been captain of one of the old river boats and later had been an overseer in the constructing of the dam. It thus came about that he was always called upon to superintend such repairing as was necessary at the dam. In the summer of 1866 he worked for several days with two helpers stopping a leak which was making trouble. A leak was made apparent by an upward boiling of the water below the fall and was usually stopped by dumping in quantities of sand bags just above. Before this job was finished the water began to rise rapidly and on the twentieth of August, when Mr. Hadley crossed the ferry to begin the day's labor, he remarked that he had never so dreaded to go to his work as he did that morning. But the morning wore quietly away and at eleven o'clock the job was pronounced done. At this moment the three men noticed the flatboat on which they were working was dragging anchor and was on the very edge of the dam. The suction of the water on the verge of the fall was terrible. There was no hope. Mr. Hadley called out for each man to take care of himself and the next instant the boat plunged into the surging waters below. Hadley and one other were drowned. The third man, when he came to himself after the shock, found he was drifting past a rock just below the fall and he managed to gain a foothold on it. His shouts at once attracted attention and thousands of people gathered on the banks within a few minutes. A crew of the old watermen was soon found for one of the
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flatboats. The boat came up along shore and when it turned its head out into the river and tossed on the broken waters, made its uncer- tain way toward mid-stream, the multitude on the bank held its breath with anxiety. Then the rock was reached, the man clambered aboard, and a great shout went up from the crowds on shore. But it was quickly hushed, for the foaming rapids below were still to be passed. Two of the boatmen were at the oars, the other two stood, one on each side at the bow, with poles in hand and a watchful eye on the currents before them. They knew the channel and the suction of every rock. The boat started on its course and went straight down through the rapids like a race horse, tossed or guided this way or that in the wild waves, and at times half lost in dashing spray, but presently it came out safe in the quieter waters below. Then the witnessing crowds breathed freely again and gave vent to their feeling in long continued cheering.
In a little shanty by the canal on the South Hadley side, at the foot of Glasgow Hill, lived Rufus Robinson in his last years all alone. He was one of the old boatmen and had the reputation of being the most skillful waterman on the river. No one had a higher opinion of Rufus Robinson than Rufus Robinson himself. In earlier days he had distinguished himself by piloting down the rapids a steamboat which had been built for use above, but proved unprofitable. Now he thought he could row a boat right across on top of the dam and come to no harm. He was a limber, graceful, daring fellow, a very good sort of person except for the liquor he let run down his throat. And so, as in many a case before his day and since, he met death through drink. One Sunday, having rowed across the river to slake a dryness he was subject to, he was seen to come down to his boat later with staggering steps and a few minutes afterward the boat was dashed over the dam.
Another tragic story has a woman for its subject. It was a win- ter's evening. The river above the dam was frozen in a glary sheet of ice and a strong north wind had come up and was sweeping with bitter force down the stream. The woman, after visiting at the Falls, started across the ice toward home. It was a dark night, the sky was clouded and a fine sleet was cutting through the air. She became somewhat confused in the wind and storm and when the full force of the gale struck her in mid-river she began to slip along the glassy surface. She struggled against the wind, but it still drove her along
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toward the fatal dam, whose roar was sounding in her ears above that of the storm. She fell on her knees and clung to the ice, but when she rose again to battle toward home, the wind pushed her slowly but surely toward the dam. She cried for help, but few were abroad on such a wild night, and the wind stifled her shouts so that in the dull roar of the waters, now so near, she could not have been heard a dozen yards away. She sat down with her back to the wind and took off her shoes, hoping that in stocking feet she would not slip. But her feet quickly numbed and she had to give up. In the morning the weather had cleared and quieted and then a chance passer found her body only a few feet from the edge of the dam on the glary ice which was streaked with the remnants of the night's snow scud.
In the course of time a suspicion arose that the constant pounding of the water over the dam must be wearing away the bottom below and so endangering the base of the structure. A test showed that hollows twenty, thirty and even forty feet deep had been worn in the river bed and steps were at once taken to build an apron to the dam. This was done in 1868-70. First these worn hollows were filled with sand bags and with "cribs" made of logs criss-crossing and filled with stone till they sank. The stone came from all the country around and many a farmer took this opportunity to sell at a profit the old stone walls zig-zagging about his fields. While this work was going on, a diver, who had gone below to examine the cavity they were filling, was caught by the current, the tubes and cords connecting him with the surface were snapped, and he was never seen again. Search for the body was unavailing. He was probably drawn into some crevice and buried beneath the sand and rubbish churning about in the water. So there he lies to this day, walled in the dam.
The apron almost rivaled the main structure in size and solidity. It had the same slope as the upper part and a base of fifty feet. Down this the water slipped with a mellow roar, quite gentle beside the heavy pounding of earlier days, and the loose windows and doors of the neighborhood trembled no more at the dam's mighty pulsations.
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