USA > Massachusetts > Hampshire County > South Hadley > History of the sesqui-centennial anniversary celebration of the town of South Hadley, Mass., July 29-30, 1903 > Part 8
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Previous to 1830 Alonzo Blodgett had a forge and trip hammer at Batchelor's Falls, where the road running northerly from South Hadley meetinghouse ended, after crossing the "Forge Bridge" over Batchelor's Brook. He bought hoop and other kinds of waste iron, which the modern junk dealer picks up, and hammered it into bars of any size that customers might require. Thrifty owners of horses used to carry him their accum- ulations of old shoes to be forged into such shapes as they needed for use.
Blodgett was dead, however, his forge a memory of the past and the town had extended the road from the brook northward to the highway leading from Moody Corner to Rock Ferry, when, in October, 1832, Israel Lyman conveyed a little more than an acre of land, on the east side of the brook and northeast of the Broom Ilandle Factory, to Sidney and Benjamin Franklin Smith, father and son, of Granby. Franklin Smith, as he was called, was quite a young man but, first of Americans, had in- vented machinery and tools for manufacturing buttons from shells, or pearl buttons as they were known in the market. A mill was built at once and the business proved highly successful. Smith, while absorbed in his business and in improving his ma-
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chinery, was a very sociable man and a leader in the merry mak- ing of the village. His inventive faculty afforded many delight- ful surprises for the young people and some of the old boys tell yet of the fireworks which he made and exhibited in front of the church, one Fourth of July evening. After ten years, business matters went badly and after much shifting about of the prop- erty, he died suddenly. After his death, the manufactory was closed and the only memorial that remains of him is the name of Pearl City, which his business gave the hamlet. In 1853 the property was bought by John Lewis Faber of Charleston, South Carolina. He was a man of wealth and installed machinery for doing the chasing on metals, such as is seen on watch cases. He fitted up a house and lived and entertained company in good style, the business seeming to be a secondary matter. In 1862 he sold to Martin W. Burnett. The property was next transformed into a woolen mill and run by Samuel Pyne for the Agawam Woolen Company. After this the Kenworthy Brothers occupied the mill in the same line of manufacture. Next the Pearl Paper Company began the making of tissue papers. After its failure, George Hoffman continued the manufacture until he sold to B. F. Perkins & Son, who now own the property and do business as the Japanese Tissue Mills.
At the Canal Village Josiah Bardwell owned a long strip of river bank south of the canal and extending from the site of the present dam nearly to the mouth of Buttery Brook. He had a wing dam which was built obliquely far out into the river and turned the swift current of the rapids towards the bank, for the use of his grist and sawmills.
This water also furnished power for an oil mill, a half interest in which was bought in 1818 by Daniel Gillett, Jr., trader, and his cousin Isaac C. Bates, the Northampton lawyer who died a United States Senator. They paid for half the mill and privilege twenty-two hundred and fifty dollars. The mill made linseed oil. The flax seed which it crushed was bought from the farmers who raised flax for their home-made linen. The price paid for the seed was from thirty-seven and a half to fifty cents a bushel and salt was often exchanged for it, bushel for bushel.
In 1824 Charles Howard and Wells Lathrop, under the firm name of Howard & Lathrop, had a prosperous general store in Springfield. In September of that year, they bought from Josiah
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Bardwell land between the canla and the river, lying ten feet east of the oil mill and having a frontage of one hundred feet upon the river. With this land they also purchased a right to draw water from Bardwell's pond. At the same time they bought the building opposite Josiah Bardwell's honse in which Hiram Smith long afterwards kept store and postoffice.
They at once built upon the privilege a small mill to make book, news and writing paper.
That year a young man, named Joseph Carew, had begun work in their Springfield store. In 1825 he was transferred to the store which had been opened in connection with the Howard and Lathrop mill. In 1830 he was made superintendent of the mill and, three years later married Maria, daughter of Josiah Bardwell.
At this time David Ames had a small paper mill in Spring- field, having been one of the first in Western Massachusetts to engage in the business.
In 1831 his sons, David, Jr., and John, under the firm name of D. & J. Ames, bought of Josiah Bardwell, upon the river, west of his gristmill, land which extended upstream "to near the top of the hill" or probably in line with the present office building of the Carew Manufacturing Company. They at once built a paper mill and set up a newly invented machine, the out- put of which they controlled. It made paper in a continnous strip, instead of in single sheets as when made by hand. This strip of paper was dried by passing over a cylinder, heated by steam, and, after leaving the cylinder, was cut into sheets which were laid in piles by the boy who has given his name to the lay boy of the modern machine.
The Messrs. Ames, father and sons, were fond of asserting that their two mills, which together could not turn out much more than two tons of paper a day, prodneed two-thirds of the fine paper manufactured in the United States.
Joseph C. Parsons, afterwards a great name in the paper- maker's world, was superintendent of their mill.
The first house built at "the Canal" by the Proprietors of the Lock and Canals was, probably, what is now known as the "Palmer House" at the corner of Main and North Main streets. This is, undoubtedly, "the superintendent's house" of which President Dwight speaks and was probably created about the time when the canal was completed, in 1793. In deeds given
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a few years later it is referred to as the inn kept by Henry Ben- nett. The Proprietors sold the place to Daniel Lombard in 1806 and as the increasing business of the canal must have required a larger inn, it is fair to infer that one had been founded before the Bennett inn was sold. As there is no record of any other publie house in the Canal Village than the old "Canal Tavern" which stands at the western end of Main street and is now called the "Glasgow House," it is probable that the old tavern was built before 1806.
In 1835, which was the most flourishing period in the history of South Hadley canal, the house was kept by JJason Stockbridge, who paid one dollar a day for the rent of the house and large barn, which stood where the selectmen's office, the lock-up and en- gine house now are. This high rental was justified by the business done at the tavern. It was well known along the river and, in the season, served dinner daily to one hundred or more boatmen and raftsmen, while there were plenty of customers for breakfast and supper and to fill the lodging rooms. If the truth is told, there were such lively goings on at the tavern that few besides rivermen cared to indulge in the hospitable accommodations of Landlord Stockbridge.
The front of the first floor of the building was occupied for a grocery store by Pliny Day, who lived where Policeman Back- ley now does. He had a son, Henry Day, who was clerk in the law office of Daniel Lord of New York. Henry married Mr. Lord's daughter, became his partner and died, not long ago, a several times millionaire. Henry Day's daughters married into the Chicago MeCormick and other distinguished families. Up to within a few years of his death, he frequently drove through the valley in his carriage and always visited the humble home of his boyhood. Another son of Pliny Day's, Addison, was a very prominent railroad man in Missouri.
At the southeast corner of the front of the building was a flight of stairs which ascended to a landing place before the door which opened into the second story and was the main entrance of the tavern. On the left hand as one entered was the barroom and on the right was the parlor.
A man named Eno once surprised Landlord Stockbridge by riding his horse up the stairs and into the barroom.
In the barroom, liquor was pure and plentiful and cheap. Here was a glass and there a bottle or decanter. You took your
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rum or gin or brandy, clear or watered to your taste and with or without a lump of loaf sugar. You helped yourself and whatever or how much so ever you took for a drink, the price was six cents.
This was the main floor of the building. In the south wing toward the canal was the kitchen. There was no fence in those days before the window to hide the mysteries of that department from common eyes and sometimes a fastidious riverman would decline to eat at Landlord Stockbridge's table because, while passing the loeks, he had with his own eyes discovered that the cook was a negro woman.
The second story of the north wing, towards the barn, was devoted to the dining room and the story above contained a large chamber with ten beds in it, for boatmen and raftsmen.
The entire front part of the third story of the main building was occupied by a hall, in which there were frequent exhibitions of traveling shows and performances of every kind. Here stocks of goods, brought from away, were sold at auction. A man named Hitchcock eame every year from Boston with books and had a sale which lasted through several days and evenings.
But the hall was in its glory in winter time, when sleighrides came to the tavern from all the towns around and more especially on occasions of the three or four balls, which graced it during the season. Then old Vinton of Belchertown was sure to be present with his fiddle and light feet kept time with his nimble fingers.
It was a stirring sound in those days to hear the driver blow his horn as the Amherst and Springfield stage rattled down the North Main street hill or, from the south, whirled along the high river bank below the ferry. The steaming horses took breath in front of the tavern while postmaster Obediah P. Ingraham, in his store, of which a mere outline of the cellar remains, west of the blacksmith shop, overhanled the mail bag to pick out all matter directed to South Hadley Canal.
At the west end of the postoffice building, John Gaylord had his boot and shoe shop. His apprentice in the early thirties was a round-faced, red-cheeked boy whom the gay paper mill girls called "Pound Royal." He was known later 'as the wealthy Emerson Gaylord of Chicopee.
In the west half of the briek block farther down Main street, which Miss Elizabeth Gaylord now owns, a drug store was then kept by Edward Sonthworth, who afterwards gained well used wealth from the mill of the Southworth Paper Company of Mit-
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tineagne. Ile lived in the house on Bardwell street which George I. Smith now owns and occupies.
By 1837 South Hadley had become quite a manufacturing town. There were two woolen mills, with three sets of machinery and yearly produeing sixty thousand yards of cloth, valued at forty-five thousand dollars; three paper mills, with an aggregate capital of one hundred thousand dollars, which employed forty- three men and forty-one women, used twelve hundred and fifty tons of stock and produced paper worth one hundred and sixty- one thousand five hundred dollars each year; two pearl button factories, with a total capital of forty-two hundred dollars and an annual product of eighteen thousand gross of buttons and a tannery which turned out eighteen thousand four hundred dol- lars worth of leather each twelvemonth.
The rivalry between Howard & Lathrop and D. & J. Ames was intense and ranged from wordy battles over the amount of water drawn by each other from the pond formed by Bardwell's wing dam, to open conflicts in the fields or highway where the men of one company sought to prevent those of the other from laying an aqueduet to bring spring wash water into its mill. On some bright morning ten or a dozen of the Ames men, on leaving home for work, would walk into the strong hands of a troop of waiting deputy sheriff's and constables and be hurried away for trial on charges of assault and battery or breach of the peace or malicious mischief before Justice Samuel Wells of Northampton. A few morning's later some of the Howard & Lathrop men would have a similar experience. "The mill owners paid the fines and costs of their men, and lawyers as well as village gossips were kept busy.
Finally, the antagonism culminated in a great suit in equity in which the leading lawyers of four counties and a member of the Suffolk bar were engaged.
Lawyer Charles E. Forbes of Northampton, afterwards a Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, was appointed a special master to hear and report the evidence and for two hot summer months the hearing of testimony went on in the hall of the canal tavern.
Mr. Carew was fond of recounting the exciting times and hairbreadth escapes which men of both sides had by night in creeping about the mills to take measurements of the water used or to prevent such measurements. At length the last witness
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had testified, the master filed his report, long arguments were made by counsel and, after due deliberation, the Supreme Court by Chief Justice Shaw, handed down its opinion covering twenty- five printed pages which stated that the case had not been tried upon the proper issues, and that had the ease been properly tried, the plaintiffs would not have been entitled to any damages be- cause the suit had been prematurely brought and that the bill could not be amended so as to entitle the plaintiff's to the relief asked for. Thus ended a seven years' litigation.
Whether or not the payment of lawyers' fees and other legal expenses rendered the litigants insolvent, it is a fact that both companies not long afterwards failed and the mills were closed.
A little later both mills were burned and Canal Village sank into idleness and despair.
The men whose occupation was gone had nothing to do but visit Deacon Alonzo Bardwell's tannery, for the pleasure of seeing work go on.
Josiah Bardwell as early as 1824 had a salt house, standing across the street from his residence where the blacksmith shop near the west end of Main street now stands. Here he ground lump salt, which came from Nantucket. After the closing of the Howard & Lathrop mill, Mr. Bardwell and his son-in-law, Joseph Carew, with young David Damon of Northampton, formed a co- partnership under the style of Bardwell. Damon & Co., and began business as dealers in salt at the old salt house. Salt was then sold in bulk, being weighed out to the purchaser as sugar is now. The new firm, however, introduced an improvement by selling . their salt in eloth bags, each holding a specified weight, and mak- ing work for many needlewomen and delighting their customers. The novelty took at once and spread from South Hadley Falls all over the country. After Mr. Bardwell's death Carew & Damnon continued the business until 1848, when Mr. Carew devoted him- self to his new paper mill and Damon became station agent at Ireland Depot, which is now Holyoke.
Wells Lathrop, of the insolvent firm of Howard & Lathrop, retired to his fertile farm, now owned by Otis AA. Judd, and there began the business of market gardening which has since grown to such proportions in South Hadley.
Ilis brother, Paoli Lathrop, who lived next north of him, on the old Enoch White place, some fifteen years before, had intro- duced to South Hadley the business of breeding short horned
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cattle and had become widely known as one of the foremost breeders of the country.
The land now owned by Messrs. Smith and Hoffman at the upper end of Bardwell street, with that of Henry W. Judd and what lies northeast of upper Prospect street, was his famous pasture and editors of agricultural papers never wearied of writ- ing it up and giving pen pictures of the high-bred Lords and Dukes and Presidents, with the milky mothers of their herd, standing knee deep in the lush grass.
The editors of the valley papers faithfully informed their readers of Mr. Lathrop's frequent sales at princely prices, of choice members of his herd, for shipment to all quarters of the country.
D. & J. Ames were more publie spirited than their rivals in business and did much to develop the village. It was their enter- prise which built up Canal street and the adjacent region of the hill.
It was through David Ames that the homestead of Theodore Bellows, the village blacksmith, who had his shop on the ledge south of F. D. Cordes' house, was purchased for the South Religious Society in May, 1834, and the brothers contributed liberally for the building of the church.
At a meeting held in the schoolhouse on February 28, 1824, it was voted to form a Congregational Society and on August twelfth of the same year a church of nineteen members was formed. Services were held in the Brick Chapel until, in 1835, the new church building was dedicated. The Rev. Flavel Gris- wold had been installed as pastor on December 3, 1828.
A Methodist Episcopal Church of twenty members was organized in the latter part of the year 1827. The first class was gathered in the Brick Chapel by Rev. Dr. Fisk, who ministered to the church for two or three years. He was succeeded by John Knight, a student of Wilbraham Academy, the services being held in the old white schoolhouse. The organization of the church was the result of a revival under his preaching. When, at length, the schoolhouse became too small for the increasing attendance, a larger room was secured in the Howard & Lathrop mill. In the autumn of the year 1832 a meetinghouse was built on Gaylord street, which thereafter, until the present year, was called Meth- odist street.
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The Baptists of the Canal Village were too few to establish a church of their own but, on November 28, 1828, united with those of Chicopee in forming a church of seventeen members at Willimansett schoolhouse. Services were held in the schoolhouse, in private houses and finally in the D. & J. Ames mill until the year 1832, when a small church was built at Chicopee Falls.
The members of the denomination at South Hadley Falls attended this church for some twenty years until the Second Baptist Church was built in Holyoke, near the present office of the Holyoke Water Power Company.
But, while all denominations were thus provided for, there were some residents of the Canal Village who did not attend church services.
There was Harry Robinson, one of the family of consummate watermen, famous throughout the valley. He was not the equal of his brother Rufus as an all around riverman but had a more inventive genius. He was, properly, a "pilot over Willimansett" but had watched the laborious process of rowing or poling the ferryboat across the eddy below the great falls and devised a plan to make the river do the work. On a Sunday morning, so the story goes, he had a long, strong rope fastened upstream and attached the loose end to the upriver side of the ferryboat, forward of the center. Then he pushed the boat out into the current. The storn swung downstream causing the prow to point at quite an angle up the river. The current, striking the inclined side of the boat pushed the craft to the opposite shore and the swing ferry had been invented.
And there were other non-attendants. Of a bright Sunday morning, some of the young fellows of the Canal would take an early start for uptown. But Parson Condit did not enjoy the privilege of imparting the truth to them, for they passed by on the other side of the common. Stopping, perhaps, for a little spiritual refreshment at Salothiel Judd's tavern, they went steadily through Lubber's Hole, and over Batchelor's Brook and Dry Brook Hill. There was no meetinghouse in that direction this side of Dr. Woodbridge's, at Hadley, but even Dr. Wood- bridge's powerful voice never reached their ears, for they finished their course at the door of a brick house, painted yellow, which stood on the south side of the Hadley highway just beyond the road that turned down to Rock Ferry. Only faint traces of the cellar remain to indicate the site of this building. The young
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men entered this house, boldly or bashfully as their natures dictated, and made their way to a large room, on week days a kitchen, but now arranged with rows of chairs on three sides, leaving a large space vacant in the center. Here they sat down with a number of other young men and, as the minutes sped, new - arrivals quite filled the seats on two sides, while the third side was occupied by a fatherly looking, white haired man, with sundry other men and a very large and a very handsome woman and quite a number of other women not so large nor so handsome, but, on the whole, as nice a bevy of comely women as even the Canal Village could show. There was the brooding stillness of a Quaker meeting. The old man and his companions of the third side sat calmly gazing at the floor, while the young men of the two sides silently adored the girls. At last the very large woman arose, stepped into the vacant space and began a solemn march. Soon the old man and the handsome woman and the other men and the comely girls and some of the lively gay fellows joined in the silent promenade around the floor, until all who felt moved to take part had done so. Then the men and women formed lines facing one another and, in Shaker style, began a shuffling dance towards each other, singing, under lead of the large woman's clear and powerful voice, strange psalms to stirring tunes. Gradually the dance grew faster, forward and then back again, and the singing louder, until those who came to look on were drawn by the exciting scene to join the strange people and dance and sing with the best of them. This performance was con- tinued as long as strength and breath remained and then the Mormon meeting abruptly ended.
The family came from Connecticut and lived first in Samuel Preston's house on the west side of College street, next in what is now Myron Green's house at Smiths Ferry, and then in this house of ITarvey Lyman's. They supported themselves by farm work and basket making and, by encouraging the attendance of outsiders upon their services, made some converts in the neighbor- hood.
The leader's name was Cross, a benignant old man, with a soft voice, who seemed the personification of all the virtues. Among the brethren was a son of South Hadley who afterwards joined the Shakers at Enfield, Connecticut, and, having attained the dignity of the eldership, returned to the world's people and became a prosperous business man of Springfield.
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The large woman was known among the brethren and sisters as Polly, but among the lively young men, owing to her leadership in the services, she was called "Polly Jesus."
The handsome woman married Stephen Downing, with whom she went West. Indeed, it was not long before the entire faniily migrated to Joe Smith's wonderful city of Nauvoo, on the bank of the Mississippi.
It would have saved the Canal Village attendants upon Mor- mon meetings a long walk if the Cook's Hill road had only been built.
In March, 1827, the Commissioners of Highways for the County of Hampshire, of whom the future judge, Charles E. Forbes, was chairman, laid ont a road from the Rock Ferry road. near the sontherly end of Mt. Holyoke, along the eastern bank of the Connectient, under Cook's Hill and crossing Bachelor's Brook, to a point north of Stony Brook, on the road from South Hadley Center to Church's Ferry as byman's Ferry was then called. In December of the same year they laid a highway from this road, south of Cook's Hill to what is now called Hadley street, near the entrance to Evergreen Cemetery.
It would seem that the first road was constructed after a fashion, but nothing was done by the town about the second one.
In April, 1830, Joel Hayes, Edward Hooker and Eliphaz Moody, a committee appointed for the purpose by the town, appeared before the commissioners in support of a petition for the discontinuance of both roads. Josiah Bardwell and many other residents of the Canal Village appeared in opposition and the commissioners refused to do anything about the Cook's Hill road but discontinued the other one. In June, 1833, the Cook's Ilill road was discontinued without objection.
April 14, 1839, on petition of Alonzo Lamb and many others of the Canal Village, the old Cook's Hill road was relocated and altered .. The commissioners estimated the probable expense of re- building the road at five thousand dollars and the town was ordered to complete the work by the first day of November. On the next day, upon petition of Salathiel JJudd and others of the. Center Village, a road was laid again from the mouth of Stony Brook to Hadley street, in South Hadley, and ordered to be com- pleted by the first of October.
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