USA > Massachusetts > Hampshire County > Hadley > Historic Hadley : a story of the making of a famous Massachusetts town > Part 7
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and taught them to become his servants, refused to be driven from the land of his adoption, and is buried to-day beside the river in the beautiful valley where he delighted to dwell.
The Hadley housewife found the river a means of supplying her larder when other sources failed. Game became scarce upon the mountains and in 1698 the State enacted laws for the protection of deer. In 1740 Westwood Cooke, Samuel Rugg, and John Nash served Hadley as "Deer Reeves," and received for the detec- tion of each guilty hunter half the fine imposed for killing game contrary to law. Even wild turkeys finally disappeared, but fish was always plentiful and free to all alike. So every Hadley farmer became a fisherman, and seine and scoop-net his implements of toil. The first settlers found shad and salmon in abundance. Believing that things of value were only to be secured by means of time and labor, for many years the citizens cared little for the food so easily obtained and were ashamed when caught with fish upon their tables. Pork was their medium of exchange, and to be eating fish implied a scarcity of pork and a state of poverty to be deplored. Then salmon were taken into favor, and shad, when scooped by mistake, were thrown back into the river. After many years the fashion changed and shad became a favorite food and salmon were discarded. One old Hadley resident who had the courage to declare that shad are very
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good whether one has any pork or not was said to have a "very peculiar taste." But whatever the opinion, when game became scarce the people were thankful to take the food provided without question or complaint. The thought that fish could be worth money did not at first enter their minds, and there has been found no record of the sale of shad before 1733.
In 1715 the General Court made an additional grant of a tract of land four miles square to the township of Hadley, so that the town should thereafter include within its limits what is now South Hadley and South Hadley Falls and control the fishing privilege at the "Greate Falls" on the east side of the river. Three other excellent fishing places, one below the mouth of Mill River, one a little east of the southern end of the same river, and another near Hockanum Meadow, belonged especially to Hadley. Forty salmon, weigh- ing between thirty and forty pounds each, were caught in one day near the second of these places, and here Enos Lyman took three thousand one hundred and forty fish in one prodigious haul. Josiah Pierce and six other Hadley men owned a seine together in 1766, and sold shad for a penny apiece. The first dam at South Hadley Falls made it difficult for the salmon to ascend the river, so that after 1800 few were caught in the upper stream.
The settlers, having learned from the Indians their method of taking fish from the rocks at the "Greate
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Falls," devised improvements as facilities increased. Each spring time crowds of men and boys hastened to this famous fishing place to gather in the bounty of the river. The first of May became a sort of picnic season, anticipated through the long winter by those to whom vacations were unknown. Life was one tedious work day of interminable hours, so that the youth of Hadley hailed with joy an excuse for anything like recreation. With the approach of the shad season nets and other fishing implements were repaired, and all was made ready for the great event of the year. When April showers had melted the snows which had made the roads impassable, a straggling procession climbed the hills and struggled through the mud with all faces turned toward the "Greate Falls." Here were men on horseback with bags in which to load their fish, and here a farmer rode in his cart, and again a horseman led another horse provided to carry the load. Many brought provisions intending to camp upon the river bank, and others sought accom- modation in homes along the way. Hadley inns thus became crowded, and private houses were filled with guests. From the middle of April until toward the first of June all Hampshire County went a fishing. Fifteen hundred horses were sometimes tied to the trees in the vicinity of the Falls, where their owners were either buying or catching fish. Below the Falls men were drawing in the seines, and from boats fas-
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tened to the rocks were taking in the shad with scoop- nets, while others were spearing sturgeon or making bargains with those who came to buy. At nightfall Hadley fishermen hastened homeward, but others from a distance camped beside the falls, and after dark, by the light of flaring torches, caught great lamprey eels which in the hill towns were much esteemed for food. Frolicsome boys enjoyed the sport of wading in the water after dark, and by the flaring torchlight, with the hand protected by a coarse yarn mitten, picked up the eels and carried them to the shore. Light and trifling youngsters spent the evening in wrestling and trials of skill, with glasses of rum for refreshment, but such sports were few and were frowned upon severely. After the fishing season fresh fish were daily on the family table, and quantities were cured for winter use, until, for self-protection, hired men, in making a contract, stipulated that they should be obliged to eat only a certain amount of salted shad.
Next to the fisheries, after the Revolution, lumbering became of great importance to the valley towns. All along the shore new villages were springing up, and with the progress of civilization came the downfall of the forests. After the peace with the Indians in 1726, great logs of pine, cut in the far north by a company of Connecticut and Massachusetts men, floated down the river on the way to the king's contractor in Boston, who purchased them for the masts of British vessels.
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Agents of the king in every town kept watch and seized all logs of the required size, claiming them by virtue of the "Pine Tree Laws," which were very offensive to the people. After the Revolution pine trees were cut and sent to market without restriction. Timber was by this time scarce in Hadley, and tradition says that more than once logs which lodged in a farmer's door- yard were built into his new house with the excuse that being on his land they were his property. Many difficulties arose between the lumbermen and farmers, the former bringing suit against the latter for stopping their logs, and the latter making complaint for the damage done to their meadows. Rafting was found to be more practicable than floating single logs, and often in the spring the river would be full of rafts, propelled by ponderous oars. With creak and groan and shouts of warning from the oarsmen, the great flotilla, laden with shingles and clapboards, swept on with the grandeur of an army corps, waking the echoes from the mountain sides, and calling the inhabitants to see the wondrous sight. The life of the lumberman was a series of adventures. Embarking near the head waters of the stream, exposed to storm and stress of weather, floating past forests infested by wild beasts, tossing through rapids and wedged between great rocks and stranded in sand and shallows, he shaped his tortuous course, and by skilful steering reached at last the haven of his hopes. Rafts of boards could
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thus be transported over the falls, but sawed lumber had to be carted, so in 1765 the "Lumber Road" was built, two and a half miles in length, from above the falls to the landing below the rapids. Near this road, in the Falls Field and Falls Wood, were three saw- mills and a tavern kept by Titus Pomeroy, and after- ward there was another, the property of Daniel Lamb. The farmers of the vicinity, changing their occupation, became carriers of lumber, and the Hadley landing- place, taken from John Chapin's farm, was a scene of great activity.
The island which had formed below Fort Meadow, not belonging to any one, was observed with envious eyes. One season the grass was cut by a Hadley citizen named Brooks, and when he came to get his hay, behold it was not there, being safely stowed away in the barn of Nathaniel Day across the river. In 1770 the General Court sold the island to Solomon . Stoddard, who made a bargain for half of it with Noah Edwards, and in 1803 Levi Shepherd bought the whole of it for $1,200.
Commerce and articles of exchange increased, and the Hadley farmer, not satisfied to raft and cart his shingles, loading and unloading at much expense of time and labor, felt that the problem of more rapid river transportation must at once be solved. Though at intervals great rocks and rapids threatened destruc- tion to any who attempted passage, and shoals and
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shallows wrought daily changes in the channel, never- theless those sturdy pioneers, having subdued the wilderness, were not to be discouraged by waterfalls and sandbars. Vast projects for improvements shaped themselves within the public mind and were expressed through the public press.
By strenuous efforts the settlers had been able from the first to carry on some traffic with their friends in the upper valley, and thus secure many things needful for their comfort. "Greate Canoes," laden with three or four tons of "Flower" and "Porke" and beaver skins, and managed by two men, were the first freight boats to run the rapids, but the passage was both difficult and dangerous. Then came the "Falls Boats," a kind of shipping now extinct. These were of two kinds: "Pine Boats," twenty-five tons burden, with neither cabin nor floor, and "Oak Boats," which were fitted up with comfortable accommodations for the crew. The tiny cabin, lighted with four windows, was warmed by a cook stove, and provided with four bunks, which in the daytime were turned up against the side of the boat. A mainmast, topmast, mainsail and topsail, made it possible to take advantage of the slightest wind, and there were two pairs of stout oars with which, when breezes failed, the boat could be moved along. Loaded with farm produce, shingles, ash plank, furs, and fish, these unwieldy vessels would move slowly down the river, assisted through the rapids
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and over the falls by experienced pilots who lived along the shore. How the boys and girls must have shouted and the women have run to the doors to see the Dispatch, or the Flying Fish, or the Clinton, or the Vermont come sailing bravely by! The name of each vessel, painted outside its cabin in large black letters, was scanned with interest from the shore, and many a farmer hailed the boatman to learn the news from up the river, or ask for transportation for something he had to sell.
Having no keel, these Falls Boats slipped over rocks and sandbars and without much difficulty reached their destination, delivered their cargoes, and were loaded again with all the various goods in the country store for use by the farmer and his family. Then came a time of trial. All those weary miles the heavily laden boat was poled up stream, with ash poles, assisted sometimes by the wind but more often in a perfect calm. Poling was the hardest work known and caused much lameness and blistering of the skin in front of the shoulder, for which a frequent application of rum was a remedy. An old writer says, "It was also thought well to take some inside." When the boat reached the rapids in its progress up the stream, either it was hitched to an ox team on shore, or several men would take the place of oxen. Reaching smooth water, and aided by a friendly breeze, it would dash onward at the furious speed of five miles an hour toward the
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next obstruction in the river. "Then," says the old writer, "the heart of the boatman rejoiced within him and the river bank echoed his songs of cheer, while the tired husbandman stood still and listened as the song and the voice passed by."
In 1792 the General Court passed an act incorpo- rating a company entitled, "The Proprietors of the Locks and Canals on Connecticut River." Great excitement prevailed at South Hadley Falls, where the first attempt at digging a canal was made. Gun powder was the only explosive known, and drilling was done by the hands of men. Outside parties contributed funds, and at last a dam was constructed, and the work went slowly on. Two miles and a half through solid rock the channel for the canal was cut. The water, flooding the adjacent meadows, produced fever and ague and indignant citizens clamored for the removal of the dam. Those interested in the fisheries demanded a fishway that the shad might go up the river to their spawning shoals. The "Proprietors," however, persisted in their undertaking. Deceml 1794, the work was so nearly completed that a day of celebration was appointed, and many men and women were allowed to ride in the great car up and down the inclined plane. South Hadley Falls was now the most interesting place in the Connecticut valley, and hun- dreds of sightseers came on horseback to view this wonderful engineering feat, supposed to be of immense
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advantage to all engaged in transportation on the river.
Hadley had now completed its first century and was a veteran among New England towns. The primitive dwellings had been replaced by comfortable homes. Double rows of English elms, the patriarchs of to-day, planted on either side of the broad street, were growing straight and tall. The fertile meadows bore yearly their autumnal harvest of hay and grain. Wheat, rye, and barley flourished on the uplands, and great fields of Indian corn, that native product of the soil, fur- nished the farmer and his family with the hasty pudding which was his staple food. Josiah Pierce had taught his neighbors how to raise potatoes, but turnips were liked much better. The women made from flax the cloth for garments, bed clothing, and table linen, and, adding wool to flax, made linsey-woolsey for dresses, and to be exchanged for household utensils and im- ported stuff for gowns.
Levi Dickinson, a native of Wethersfield, who came to Hadley in 1786 and settled on the "Back Street," brought with him a queer new kind of "corn seed," which he showed his friends, saying that when fully grown it would make better brooms than they had ever seen. Hearing this, the Hadley housewife laughed him to scorn. "Husk brooms," to sweep the ovens, and "splinter brooms" made of birchen boughs, were good enough for every day, while the bristle and hair
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brooms, brought from England, certainly could not be surpassed by a farmer with any kind of corn. Thus reasoned the incredulous and argued not the case. Levi Dickinson, however, not discouraged, kept his own council, harvested the first crop of broom corn from his garden, contrived a method of scraping the seed from the brush with a knife, and afterward with the edge of a hoe, and sitting in a chair with the twine in a roll under his feet wound it around the brush in his lap and thus made brooms. Not asking his neighbors to buy, in 1798 he peddled his brooms in Williamsburg, Ashfield, and Conway, and said that the day when he sold his first broom was the happiest day of his life. In 1799 he carried brooms to Pittsfield and in 1800 as far as New London.
Then Hadley people began to realize that a new and profitable industry had been started in their midst. Cato, a colored man, planted some broom corn in the meadow, and William Shipman, Solomon Cooke, and Levi Gale began to raise the corn and manufacture brooms. Men in Hatfield and Whately went into the business, and Levi Dickinson, smiling to himself, calmly drove his teams loaded with brooms to Boston and to Albany and found a ready market. Making his own handles and spinning the twine from his own flax, the cost of the broom was little and the demand for the finished product was great. In 1810, 70,000 brooms were made in Hampshire County, and before the death
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of Levi Dickinson in 1843 people in all parts of the country were using Hadley brooms, and his triumph against local prejudice was complete. Broom corn had been cultivated for its seed in southern Europe, and a small amount was raised in the southern states, but the credit of planting it in large quantities and sup- plying the whole country with brooms belongs to Levi Dickinson. In 1850 Eleazer Porter, who took the census, reported forty-one broom factories and 769,700 brooms and 76,000 brushes produced in a single year within the limits of the little town of Hadley.
The canal had served its purpose in part when steamboats began to be used for transportation, and Hadley people were led to hope that they too might have a share in the benefits of this marvel- ous invention. The citizens longed and watched and listened for the little towboat Barnet, built in New York to ply upon the river. When, after many failures to ascend Enfield Falls, she was hauled bodily over the rocks and really appeared around Hockanum Bend, propelled by the wondrous power of steam, the people made a great rush to get on board the barge which she had in tow, and thus secure a share in this novel excursion. Then came the memorable flood, when travelers were taken in boats from Hadley Street across the meadows to Northampton, and buildings, trunks of trees, ruins of mills, bridges and fences, hay, pumpkins, apples, and cackling hens came dashing
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down the stream to be landed along the shore. The river itself seemed to resent invasion by this puffing, wheezing monster of steam and took revenge on all within its reach.
The steamer Vermont next started out from Hartford, bound for the Green Mountain State. Her passengers exclaimed with delight at the beauty of the scenery as she passed within the shadow of Titan's Pier, where columnar rocks rise high above the water's edge. Here was the abode of Manitou, the Great Spirit, and here two Indians were pursued and driven off the cliff to find death in the unknown depths below. Just beyond, to gain a few rods in distance, the vessel was compelled to travel four miles through the Ox Bow. The grandeur of those majestic moun- tains, valued chiefly as "woodlots" by farmers of the valley, impressed the strangers from the south, who gazed with surprise at the primitive hotel, kept by Willis Pease of Hadley, which, on the high summit of Mount Holyoke, appeared against the glowing sky. Past Stoddard's Island, over School Meadow Flats, beneath the sandstone cliff of Sugar Loaf, toward the green hills of her namesake state, steamed the Vermont, creating the hope that passenger traffic on the river had at last really commenced.
The summer of 1831 the steamboat William Hall left Hadley for Hartford three times a week, connecting with steamers for New York. Those were gala days
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for Hadley, but alas, the fates seemed unpropitious, and though many small steamboats were built and put into commission, yet the steamboat company failed, boilers burst, the shoals and currents shifted, and floods destroyed the work of years in a single night. One wintry morning, February 25, 1840, the people of Hockanum were surprised to find that the river had worn away the neck of the peninsula and cut a new channel for itself, thus making an island of three hundred acres of land, owned by Hadley farmers and worth thousands of dollars.
The reign of the steamboat could not be prolonged, for the day of the railroad was near at hand. July 4, 1845, the steamer Franklin left the wharf at Hadley, with two hundred people on board, "from the beauty and chivalry of West Street," bound for Montague. There they passed the day, enjoyed a picnic dinner with speeches and music, and returned in safety. This is the last we hear of steamboating at Hadley. That same year the people, crossing the toll bridge, could board the train behind the engine "Holyoke " and jolt away toward Springfield and the south. Opponents of the railroad became reconciled as its usefulness in carrying freight became understood. One enthusiast even found the railroad picturesque, and viewing the spring freshet from the tower of the church wrote thus to the Hampshire Gazette:
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"The swollen river lay spread out at our feet in broad expanse, while scarce raised above the flood, the long straight line of railroad extended, and the ponderous train flying o'er it seemed like some huge sea bird, skimming the yielding wave with tireless wing."
Years later the Boston & Maine Railroad, passing through Hadley, connected Northampton with the capital city of the state, and since then the trolley has given Hadley citizens freedom to choose their ways and means of travel. The "huge sea bird" of iron and steam still flies over the "yielding wave " when the river overflows its meadows, but the river steamer is a thing of the past. The Pine Boats and Oak Boats, the captains and pilots, are unknown to the present generation. The scream of the locomotive echoes from the mountain sides, and all along the shore the trolley cars rush wildly seeking for their prey. The romance of the river has departed, its quiet and seclu- sion are invaded, its great pine forests are destroyed. Yet, unconquered, it takes its tortuous course, refusing to be curbed, impossible to control, declining to be improved, a wilful stream the same in nature as when the white man first gazed upon its waters.
To-day, as summer travelers admire the beauties of the Connecticut, the prosaic sunlight leaves little for imagination to feed upon. Yet, when beneath the midnight moon all discordant sounds have for a
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moment ceased, through the winding sheet of mist which hovers over the river's surface we fancy we catch the echoing dip of a shadowy paddle, and discern a light canoe darting from shore to shore. The unquiet ghost of some old Indian boatman has returned to haunt the valley and stream which were his ancient heritage. Again the river banks are clothed with dark pine forests, and from their depths the deer come down to drink and all is quiet sylvan beauty. The River of Pines is again a reality. To him whose eyes have been unsealed, for this magic moment the old days have returned.
THE HADLEY CEMETERY
CHAPTER VI
THE BURIAL PLACE OF HADLEY'S HONORED DEAD
WITHIN the limits of the little river town, during the long years of effort and accomplishment, there had grown up another settlement, - the Hamlet of the Dead. Here, in 1661, on the Meadow Plain, near the home lot of Edward Church, the body of an unnamed infant of Philip Smith, grandchild of Lieutenant Sam- uel Smith, the first settler, was buried without prayer or service. A few months later Governor John Web- ster was in the same rude fashion, near the grave of the nameless child, placed beneath the sod. This was the beginning of Old Hadley cemetery, and here within the area of two hundred and ten square rods of rolling upland were buried for more than one hun- dred and thirty years all who died in Hadley.
Some sort of stone must have been placed at the grave of Governor Webster, for when in 1812 Noah Webster, his descendant in the fifth generation, came to live in Amherst, he had no difficulty in finding the resting-place of his distinguished ancestor, and erected above the same a monument to his memory, that bears the following words:
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"To the memory of John Webster, Esq., one of the first settlers of Hartford in Connecticut, who was many years magistrate, or assistant and afterwards Deputy Governor and Governor of the colony, and in 1659 with three sons, Robert, William and Thomas asso- ciated with others in the purchase and settlement of Hadley, where he died in 1665."
The date here given, which is four years later than that given by the historian and genealogist, was prob- ably indistinct upon the old stone, and therefore copied incorrectly.
This burial-place remained as Nature had left it during all those early years. No attempt at improve- ment or formal laying out of grounds was made, but, as overcome by disease, or slain by Indians, or worn to death by hard and constant toil, the weary workers ceased their labors, they were laid to rest beneath the pines and cedars and the life of the town went on as before. Nathaniel Ward, whose death occurred soon after that of Governor Webster, left his empty house a bequest to Hadley youth. John Hawkes and Thomas Stanley were the next of the first settlers to be carried on the shoulders of their fellow townsmen to their last long home. John Barnard, Richard Church, Stephen Terry, William Westwood, William Partrigg, and Andrew Bacon died in close succession, and Thomas Coleman followed them in 1674. Henry Clark, the patron of the Hopkins School, amid the
THE MEADOW PLAIN AND THE HOLYOKE MOUNTAINS Looking Southeast from the River
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