USA > Massachusetts > Bristol County > Somerset > History of the town of Somerset Massachusetts : Shawomet purchase 1677, incorporated 1790 > Part 14
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On Sunday, July 29, St. Patrick's Church unfolded a service flag with forty-one stars.
August brought the announcement of the War Depart- ment's plan to send a total of five million men into the war and its intention to withdraw its units from the British and French armies to form the American Expeditionary force. On the 12th, a U-boat sank three vessels off Nantucket. Airplane and sub-chaser forces patrolled the coast night and day. On August 25, all who had arrived at the age of 21 since the original draft were registered. Throughout the month the guns roared along the Somme and the Hindenburg line began to crack.
By September 7 the A. E. F. was organized and on September 12 started its career as a separate army with an attack to straighten out the St. Mihiel salient.
On the same day, under a new draft law, all men between the ages of 18 and 45 were registered for service. The day added thirteen million men to the eligible military force ; 475,000 in Massachusetts alone ; 375 in Somerset.
Registration for Precinct One was at the Town offices by Town Clerk G. Walter Simmons, assisted by D. Borden Davis, J. Isaac Peirce and Frederick Dudley. Precinct Two registration was at the Old Town Hall, in charge of Select- man Franklin S. Simmons assisted by Frank C. Chace, Frederick Bogle and Samuel B. Wood.
The influenza which ultimately cost more American lives than the war and caused more United States Army deaths than all its battles was described by press bulletins on
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THE WORLD WAR
September 20 as an epidemic. In September, Fall River was in its grip. On Wednesday, September 25, Somerset schools were closed until further notice. The number of cases in town was three hundred, and the town hired nurses to assist the overworked doctors, while volunteer committees fed families where no one was left to earn food or prepare it.
At the epidemic's height, the "Fighting Fourth" Liberty Loan was launched. Public meetings being forbidden, the loan went slowly but was ultimately subscribed. September ended with the Allied armies slashing at Hindenburg from Verdun to the sea.
On October 2, the Hindenburg Line was broken. On the 4th, the A. E. F. was pouring through it at St. Quentin. On the 8th, the Germans asked for an armistice which was denied. On the 9th, the Allies took Cambrai.
By mid-October the influenza epidemic was waning. On the 17th, Hindenburg's retreat had become a rout. On the 26th, Turkey surrendered. The United War Work campaign for the Salvation Army, the Knights of Columbus and the Y. M. C. A. went over the top in the exuberance of victory.
On November 4, Austria surrendered and the inter- vening week to 11 o'clock on the morning of November 11 was one of hourly victory bulletins and mounting joy. The Armistice Day celebration in Somerset began at four o'clock in the morning, after a night made dark by the failure of all electric power owing to transmission troubles having nothing to do with war, and lasted until nine o'clock at night.
One hundred and forty-nine men and six women then resident in Somerset, according to the bronze record of the War Memorial had active service in the World War. The personal records of so large a number are now beyond trac- ing even if the scope of this history could contain them.
Five Somerset men died in the service: Lieutenant Warren S. Hathaway, of wounds received in action at Cham- pagne in October, 1918; John Damas, in action in June, 1918; Desire Cloutier, in action in August, 1918; Joseph Ogden, of pneumonia at Washington in June, 1918, and Joseph A. Miller, of pneumonia at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, in September, 1918.
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HISTORY OF SOMERSET
A striking phase of Somerset's record in the War is the number of families represented by more than one son. There were four instances of brothers in uniform at one time and a fifth of three brothers and a sister. These were:
Frank C. Lynch, first Somerset man to enlist, Harold V. Lynch, John J. Lynch and William F. Lynch.
David F. Pierce, Edward F. Pierce, John H. Pierce, and Thomas F. Pierce.
Alexander Thibeault, Jr., Edward Thibeault, H. Joseph Thibeault and Michael M. Thibeault.
Clifford B. Grime, Herbert Grime, Frederick Grime and Arthur Grime.
James L. Donahue, P. Joseph Donahue, Harry L. Donahue and Ellen C. Donahue.
In five families there were three enlisted :
Clayton Brown, Leroy E. Brown and Olin F. Brown; Edward Simmons, Howard W. Simmons and Allen Sim- mons; John F. Leonard, Joseph E. Leonard and Michael H. Leonard; Cornelius V. Coleman, George W. Coleman and James H. Coleman; Arthur A. Smith, Thomas A. Smith, and Annie C. Smith.
In ten families there were two brothers or a brother and a sister enlisted :
Albert B. Almy and Israel T. Almy; Joseph Cohen and Robert Cohen; Charles C. Cronan and Edward Cronan; Frank A. Fitzgerald and Helen V. Fitzgerald; John T. Griffin and Michael J. Griffin; Leonard A. Miller and J. Hiram Miller; John Parsons and Robert Parsons; Harold J. Regan and Helen F. Regan ; George F. Simmons, Jr., and Herbert Simmons; Arthur R. Whittaker and George E. Whittaker.
The records of this war for the first time include the names of women as members of the army and navy. This was owing to the award of enlisted rating to Red Cross nurses, and to naval rating of women clerks in that service as yeoman. The navy roster entered these clerks as Yeoman (F), and the phrase "Yeoman-F," popular in service cir- cles, soon circulated among civilians as "Yeomanette." Somerset's woman veterans number six : Ellen C. Donahue,
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THE WORLD WAR
nurse; Helen V. Fitzgerald, yeoman; Mildred A. Lufkin, yeoman; Helen F. Regan, yeoman; Annie C. Smith, nurse; and Annie M. Wilbur, yeoman.
With the armistice of November 11, 1918, the town's navy and army contingents began to come home as they had gone, a few at a time, some for furloughs pending discharge and some with their final papers, filling the streets of Som- erset with khaki and blue; but it was not until the next summer that sufficient had permanently returned to justify the town's official welcome.
This was celebrated on August 28, 1919, wth a morning parade, a speech of welcome by Selectman Fernald L. Hanson, the presentation of medals, and a clambake at Dighton Rock Park with addresses by Colonel W. J. Keville of the 101st Ammunition Train, 26th Division ; and by State Treasurer Charles L. Burrill. Sports with the town's soldiers and sailors competing, and finally a ball game between the khaki and blue, ended the day.
The committee in charge of Welcome Home Day, one of the outstanding days in Somerset's history, was composed of Owen J. Eagan, chairman ; Alfred W. Tallman, secretary ; and twenty-three other citizens: Thomas F. Eagan, Adam W. Gifford, Frederick S. Clarner, Lewis E. Moulton, Frank- lin S. Simmons, Fernald L. Hanson, Daniel P. Shove, Preston H. Hood, Daniel B. Cronan, Jr., Edward Morrissey, George E. Marble, Frank C. Chace, Charles Riley, Frederick G. Bogle, Cornelius A. Davis, William Synan, Daniel Wilbur, Thomas A. Francis, Edward J. Guiney, G. Walter Simmons, Melvin G. Conary, Frederick R. H. Linley and James A. Blakeney.
Warren S. Hathaway Post, No. 228, of the American Legion was chartered on October 11, 1919. This post is the largest veteran's organization the town has had in any era, and is augmented by the Ladies' Auxiliary, organized the next year. Its commanders have been: Charles F. Butter- worth, Harold J. Regan, Carl V. Parrott, Edward R. Sim- mons, Samuel W. Gibbs, Israel T. Almy, Carl Anderson, Herbert Grime, Thomas Adamson, Albert J. Berard, William
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HISTORY OF SOMERSET
F. Lynch, Leo Clarkson, Howard W. Simmons, Manuel J. Ruby, George Lockhart, Leroy S. Brown and, in 1940, B. Hugo Nillson.
On Memorial Day, 1926, Legion and town joined in the dedication of its World War Memorial at the foot of Centre Street on Riverside Avenue. The monument is a bronze tablet set in the face of a huge conglomerate boulder chosen as characteristic native stone and doubly appropriate because it was taken from the spot where the Village School now stands. The stone is flanked by a trench gun and a four- inch field piece which saw service on the battlefields of France during the war. The monument was unveiled by Eleanor F. Maddock, little daughter of Veteran Joseph Maddock, Jr., and Russell Warren Hathaway, youngest brother of Warren S. Hathaway after whom the Legion Post is named.
In the fine and simple words of the tablet, Somerset Remembers These Sons and Daughters Who Served Their Country and Humanity in the World War:
Adamson, Thomas
Clemmy, John L.
Almy, Albert B.
Cloutier, Desire
Almy, Israel T.
Cohen, Joseph
Auclair, Amos J.
Cohen, Robert
Babbitt, Leon P.
Coleman, George W.
Banville, Edme F.
Coleman, James H.
Beaulieu, Reginald J.
Cook, John W.
Belcher, Stuart S.
Cronan, Charles C.
Biladeau, Frank
Cronan, Edward J.
Biladeau, Henry
Bradshaw, Ernest T.
DaCambra, Sinas
Bridge, Charles H.
Damas, John
Brown, Clayton R.
Deane, Norman H.
Brown, Irving F.
Deane, Russell M.
Brown, Leroy E.
DeCosta, John
Brown, Olin F.
DeMello, Joseph
Burgess, Joseph
Burnside, Archibald J.
Butterworth, Charles F.
Calder, Walter L.
Donahue, Patrick J.
Carberry, Michael
Donais, John
Doucette, Joseph
Duhamel, Hector
Caron, Jerry Cartman, Thomas Carveiro, Manuel S.
Derbyshire, Arthur R.
Demarais, Renold H.
Donahue, Ellen C.
Donahue, James L.
Dyson, John F.
Coleman, Cornelius V.
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THE WORLD WAR
Eccles, David S. Elsbree, Percy L. Emsley, William J. Estrella, Victor T.
Fassett, Gardner L. Fitzgerald, Frank A. Fitzgerald, Helen V. Fleck, John B.
Forest, George J. B. Fournier, Napoleon J.
Gallagher, Joseph E.
Gibbs, Clifton D.
Gibbs, Samuel W.
Goff, H. Elton
Griffin, John T.
Griffin, Michael J.
Griffiths, George P.
Grime, Arthur
Grime, Clifford B.
Grime, Frederick
Grime, Herbert
Haggerty, John F.
Hathaway, Charles E. Jr.
Hathaway, Warren S.
Hathaway, William S.
Hayes, Patrick F.
Hill, Frank Hill, Walter Holt, James Hood, Harold G.
Irving, William H.
Laforce, Charles
Lavoie, Joseph Lavoilette, Paul A. Lee, William J.
Leonard, John F. Leonard, Joseph E. Leonard, Michael H. Linley, Norman D. Lufkin, Mildred A. Lunch, Frank C.
Lynch, Harold V.
Lynch, James H. Lynch, John J.
Lynch, William F.
Maddock, Joseph, Jr. Mahon, Michael J. Mann, Samuel M. Marble, G. Arthur Mavall. John Mello, Manuel F. Mendes, Antonio C. Messenger, Harold R.
Miller, J. Hiram Miller, Leonard A. Moreau, Arthur J. Morel, Frederick T.
Ogden, Joseph Oldham, Henry
Parrott, Carl V.
Parsons, John T.
Parsons, Robert
Peirce, Ernest L.
Picard, George L.
Pierce, David F.
Pierce, Edward F.
Pierce, John H.
Pierce, Thomas F.
Raymond, Charles L.
Regan, Harold J.
Regan, Helen F.
Rezendes, Anthony
Richard, Rosimond J.
Rivard, August
Rose, Harry F.
Ruby, Manuel J.
Ryan, Lawrence
Silvia, Manuel
Simcock, Ernest A.
Simmons, Edward R.
Simmons, George F., Jr.
Simmons, Herbert W.
Simmons, Howard W.
Simmons, Joseph G.
Simmons, Ralph B. Simms, Leon T.
Slade, Ralph E.
Smith, Annie C.
Smith, Arthur A.
Smith, Thomas L.
Sullivan, Francis W.
Tatem, Paul O. Thibeault, Alexander Jr.
Thibeault, Henry J.
Thibeault, Edmond
Thibeault, Michael M.
Thurber, Martin L.
Traynor, Eugene
Walker, James Wamboldt, Willard A. Whittaker, Arthur R. Whittaker, George E. Wilbur, Anna M.
Williamson, Charles E. Williamson, James A. Wood, Samuel B., Jr.
SOMERSET HIGH SCHOOL
THE GOLDEN AGE
THE railroad, the trolley and the automobile wrought changes in Somerset as they did in every city and town in the land, and particularly in New England. The pass- ing of the pottery and iron industries and of the coal depot were a part of a new economics which concentrated in- dustry in distribution centers and near to raw materials.
Somerset's market and trading vessels gave way to steamships, refrigerator cars, packing houses and over- land trucks. With a garage in the rear of every house, the department store of the city was no further away in time than the Main Street shop had been. Fourteen hundred automobile owners in Somerset have today more horse- power at their command than Brad Simmons or Jule Hood ever had.
Had these changes ended Somerset's story and left it a drowsy village living on its memories it would have had nothing to be ashamed of. In days when enterprise meant vessels it was building and launching ships, be- ginning while sons of the original Pilgrims were still living. In the commerce which kept the Colonies and early New England alive and advanced them towards a great new country, it had great fleets three times recreated when war scattered them.
When clipper ships ruled the seas Somerset built and sailed some the greatest. Without a clay bank within its borders it was a pottery center. In the age when steam was taking the place of sail it furnished the first gener- ation of steamboat captains while it built or captained the greatest of the mighty schooners that made the final stand against the steamship. In the age of iron and coal it had its full part.
It could have been pardoned if it had now sat back in a glow of autumnal satisfaction. Instead, in the years
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HISTORY OF SOMERSET
that saw its last factory and its last vessel disappear Som- erset rose to new levels of population, prosperity, property valuation, beauty and municipal efficiency.
The ability of Somerset to capitalize upon the oppor- tunity of each succeeding age has been from the first its outstanding characteristic. Its assets have consistenly been matched with the courage and the enterprise to market them.
At the turn of the Nineteenth into the Twentieth Century its chief asset was an unspoiled New England town with more than ten miles of waterfront and every variety of residential site: clusters of available homes, large and small, built in the age of good taste, or well- drained slopes where the old farms between their parallel walls watched the crowded opposite shore without envy or impatience.
The industrial age had never scarfed the surface of Somerset further than a few hundred feet from its shores. Along most of its waterfront the New England instinct for neatness had cleared away the debris of each era as it passed. The docks, large and small, were neat and trim, often planted with grass. The farmlands, cleared and worked over for centuries, were ready for flowerbeds or market gardens. Somerset was, in short, a residential area lying fallow before the eyes of teeming Fall River.
The advent of the trolley in 1895 did not, therefore, empty Somerset of its people. It brought new residents. The population figures show this. In 1895, the population of Somerset was 2241; in 1905, 2349; in 1915, 3377, in 1925, 4818. In the sesquicentennial year of its incorpora- tion it is 6216, the highest figure of its 260 years of White habitation.
Valuations, the number of homes, miles of highway, school capacity, municipal services, and even: with its industries, garages, housebuilders, market gardens, dair- ies, green house, trucking and schools: the figures of per- sons employed within the town, are greater than ever before in its history.
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THE GOLDEN ERA
By 1914, the year of the World War's interruption, the destiny of Somerset as a residential community was evident. In that year the town began its latest industry : that of making Somerset a good place in which to live.
This is the date of the beginning of the town's modern building era which, to paraphrase a classic in- stance, found the town in wood and left it in brick. In 1914, the South School, on Read Street, was built. The war and its expense and distraction delayed the program for a period. America's foreign legion had scarcely been welcomed home when the construction of the Pottersville School was begun. This ample building in the modern one- floor manner, was occupied in 1923, superseding the old Pottersville Grammar School on County Street and the Roosevelt School on Pratt Street. In 1925, the Village School was started, a building of the same type, and oc- cupied in 1926, replacing the Dublin School, burned in 1924, the North Primary, now G. A. R. Hall, and the Village Grammar School which was sold and moved.
In that year, the Wilbur School was started, and occupied in 1927. In 1927, the Pottersville building of 1921 received additions of two rooms and the basement. In the following year the West Hill School was built. This was 1928, in which also the Town Office Building was erected, and the 1885 high school received an addition of two rooms. All this construction excepting the high school addition was of brick.
Meanwhile, in 1927, the Somerset Waterworks plant in North Dighton had been completed and put into op- eration. A Fall River Herald News article of July 30, 1927, gives illustrations of four buildings under construction on that date: the Wilbur Avenue School with its basement completed and the first story rising; the Town Office building ready for the roof; a new wing and basement nearly finished at the Pottersville School; and the pump- ing station in South Dighton well advanced. In addition are shown the reservoir standpipes standing finished on Richmond and Gypsy Hills and one of four trench-digging
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HISTORY OF SOMERSET
machines busy laying twenty-four miles of water mains for the new water system.
In April of 1869, a vote at town meeting ordered an appraisal of the town's school property, the figures of which were duly entered in the town records: District No. 4, schoolhouse, $575; District No. 3, schoolhouse, $1850; District No. 2, schoolhouse, $2400; in District No. 2 the Middle Schoolhouse, $1825; the North schoolhouse, $975; the Northwest schoolhouse, $300. With the cash balance or indebtedness on the books of each district the net worth of the Somerset school system in dollars that year was $5597. At the end of the Golden Age of Somerset, with the 1936 high school added, the town's school plant is ap- praised at $479,500.
The waterworks wells, pumping plant, reservoirs and mains cost in round figures $550,000. The other construc- tion under way at the same time cost $110,000 more. All of this investment is in 1940 within a year to seven years of amortization, after a period in which the costs have been so distributed that the tax rate has never risen above $26, and has reached that figure only because of depression welfare costs.
The Somerset Water System consists of 45 wells and four observation wells driven in an area in South Dighton owned by the Town of Somerset, lying about half a mile west of Elm Street and eight hundred feet north of Brook Street; together with a pumping plant at the well field and two storage standpipes, one on Richmond Hill and the other on Gypsy or Methodist Hill, with a total storage capacity of 1,192,750 gallons. With minimum rainfall conditions the plant can supply upwards of 750,000 gal- lons per day. In emergency the water flow can be in- creased a million gallons a day by diverting water from nearby Segregansett River and flooding the well area.
The joint Water Supply Committee for the town which planned and built the plant was composed of the Board of Selectmen and the Board of Water Commission- ers organized with Owen J. Eagan, chairman; Fernald
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THE GOLDEN ERA
L. Hanson, secretary; and Adam W. Gifford, John A. Grandfield, Edward J. Guiney and D. Borden Davis.
Needing only a modern high school building to com- plete a notable school system the town's government nev- ertheless waited for a reduction of its recent construction indebtedness for eight years until on June 30 of 1935 the 1885 building on South Street took fire and burned to the ground. Plans for the construction of a new building on a site long since acquired by the town for the purpose at the geographical center of the town were immediately begun. An appropriation of $80,640 from the Federal Public Works Administration was obtained through the alertness of Chairman Fernald L. Hanson of the Board of Selectmen, who secured the reassignment of appropri- ations not accepted by two other towns, and ground was broken for the new building in March of 1936.
The building, costing $195,000 and designed by Select- man Israel T. Almy, includes among its other comprehen- sive modern facilities a large combination auditorium and gymnasium. Use of the auditorium for the town meeting of March, 1937, marked its virtual opening, with the high school, which had been occupying temporary quarters in the basement of the Village school, holding there in June the class of 1937 graduation. Full occupation of the build- ing came with the opening of schools the following Sept- ember.
The committee in charge of planning this building, the finest and largest ever erected by the town, was com- posed jointly of the Board of Selectmen, the School Com- mittee and six citizens organized with First Selectman Fernald L. Hanson as chairman, School Board Chairman Preston H. Hood as secretary, and Selectman Adam W. Gifford and Israel T. Almy, School Committeemen Charles P. King and Herbert L. Hall, Town Clerk Harold J. Re- gan, and Henry A. Boisseau, Harrison W. George, Ed- ward J. Guiney, Henry J. Harvey and Thomas E. Matt- hews, members.
Growth of the town's educational and other municipal equipment was accompanied by other progress. In 1923,
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HISTORY OF SOMERSET
Somerset's institutional structures were added to by the completion of Masonic Hall on Pleasant Street. The build- ing committee, consisting of Adam W. Gifford, Fred R. H. Linley, George H. Tompkins, Israel T. Almy, Charles P. King, Elmer S. Sears and Fred I. Walker, laid the corner stone on January 6 of that year. The new hall was the third of Pioneer Lodge's regular meeting places: the first being Central Hall until that structure burned; and the second, after temporary quarters following the fire, the upper story of the Somerset car barn.
The Parks Shellac Works came to Somerset in 1916, when Edward S. Parks purchased the Iron Works Lower Mill and began there the operation of a shellac plant for the manufacture of phonograph records, in conjunc- tion with a parent plant in Fall River. In 1924, the Som- erset works was converted for the making of bleached shellac which is used in the furniture and general paint- ing and finishing trades. The Parks Company imports its own lac from India via Boston and sells its product to the larger paint and hardware dealers, and is the only plant of its kind in New England. The plant is under the management of Raymond F. Morton and employs about thirty, mainly Somerset townspeople.
The year 1923 saw also the construction of the Mont- aup Electric Company's power plant begun at Read's Woods, between Riverside Avenue and the water front. This plant, the largest and finest industrial building, and representing the largest capital investment of any plant in Somerset's history, brought much of the added proper - ty valuation which enabled the town to enter into its muncipal building program with confidence.
It is an electric generating plant owned by the Fall River Electric Light Company, the Brockton Edison Company, and the Blackstone Valley Gas and Electric Company, and is linked with the New England Power distribution system.
The plant was put into operation in 1925 and with an additional unit added in 1928, represents today an in-
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THE GOLDEN ERA
vestment of $13,000,000. A further addition involving an expenditure of $3,000,000 additional was announced in 1940 with construction planned to begin during that year. It employs 115 men and women, largely from Somerset. George U. Parks is resident general manager.
In the possession of the Montaup Plant Somerset takes the lead again as constantly in its past, in produc- ing the commodity in demand by the times, which today is electric power as definitely as it once was ships. For this good fortune the town's location is to be credited, as water-borne coal and fuel oil are essential to the Mon- taup's economy; and it may be noted in support of the Golden Age that the tonnage of ships bringing these commodities is quite probably equal to the tonnage of the Somerset fleets that used this port in its days of sail.
Home building is a large and constant element of the town's wealth and population growth. Assessors' rec- ord's show an average of forty new homes built in Somer- set annually for several years past. What this means in the town's growth may be judged from figures of 1938 when the September 21 hurricane destroyed an approxi- mate $40,000 worth of property and new taxable cons- truction in the same year amounted to $115,000.
One of the assets to the pride of Somerset in this period was the engineering and mathematical genius of Clifford M. Holland, who in 1919, at the age of thirty-six was made chief engineer for the New York and New Jersey vehicular tunnel now named the Holland Tunnel in his honor. This tunnel, described in the volume published to celebrate its opening as "the greatest engineering feat of all time," was planned by Holland and carried forward by him to within two years of its completion when he died, in 1924, worn out by the task, but leaving plans for its completion. Milton H. Freeman, appointed to succeed him, died from over-work two years later, shortly before the tunnel was opened and dedicated to Holland's mem- ory.
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