USA > Massachusetts > Hampden County > Picturesque Hampden : 1500 illustrations > Part 7
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So the summer passed and the child grew more and more a comfort to the old
MOSHER STREET. FROM MAIN.
LYMAN STREET, AT THE RAILROAD CROSSING.
MAIN STREET, NEAR DWIGHT.
42
PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN.
THE FLATIRON BLOCK.
THE MOUNT TOM HOSE HOUSE AND VICINITY.
LYMAN STREET BRIDGES.
man's life. Sometimes, in confidential moments, he talked to one and another of the room girls of his plans for the future, and his hope to give Agnes a good education.
It was again well on in the fall of the year when, one morning as he was going to work, Uncle John came upon a knot of excited people huddled near the entrance of Rum Alley. They were talking, not loudly, but in low tones of excitement and horror.
"What's the matter?" he asked, stopping near the yard.
"It's Mother Tassett," one of them replied. "She's took pison an' she's dead. The p'lice has just gone in there."
There was a stir about the door of the dingy house to which the speaker pointed. A policeman came out and a woman was with him. It was the woman
who had called on Janet the year before -the one of the frowsy hair and gay shawl. She glanced over the crowd and touched the policeman's arm.
There's a man that'll know more about her folks than I do," she said, pointing to Uncle John. "He came from the same town an' can tell you her right name and who are her kin."
The policeman made his way through the crowd and spoke to Uncle John.
" You're wanted in there, Mr. Graham, to identify the suicide," he said, jerking his head backward toward the house.
" I guess it must be a mistake," Uncle John protested. "I took the little gell after
LOOKING TOWARD THE CITY HALL, FROM RACE STREET.
Q
MAIN STREET, NORTH FROM DWIGHT.
NOON AT THE MILLS.
43
PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN.
CENTER STREET.
the woman was sent to jail, but I don't imagine the child was any kin to her. As to the woman herself, I never happened to see her, before nor since."
Nevertheless, he followed the policeman through the dirty alley back to the door.
" It's a tough place, and she's led a tough life," commented the officer, as they went up the broken steps.
Heaps of refuse and old bones and broken cans- the ever-present signs of squalor and poverty and unthrift-littered the untidy yard at the left. A hungry goat bleated in a little enclosure in the rear. The morning smoke was rising from the chimneys of the surrounding shanties, and over the wretched scene a bright ray, breaking from a cloud and shining from the east, heralded the coming sunrise.
MOSHER STREET.
THE DEPOT OF THE RIVER ROAD.
ENDEAVOR CHAPAL.
LYMAN STREET SCHOOL.
The dead woman was reclining in a great chair in the squalid room where dissipation had ended a wretched life and death had claimed her. Bloated, ghastly and piteous to look upon, there still shone through the marks and lines which dissipation had scarred on the blighted face, some traces of the comeliness of her ruined youth.
And there, with the pitiless morning light on the haggard features, Uncle John saw and knew her. The last treasured remnant of his life's romance crumbled to ashes, for the face he saw was the face of his lost love.
II. THE GHOST OF THE SPOOL-ROOM.
In the early winter evenings when the gas was lighted in the spool-room of No. 2 mill, the voice of the machinery took a different sound from the burden it had been carrying through the day. It seemed to be pitched on a higher
SCHOOL, CORNER CENTER AND DWIGHT STREETS.
44
PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN.
SOUTH HOLYOKE, FROM DEPOT HILL.
swaying backward among their frames, and the warp tenders guiding the threads from creel to warping beam, with raised right arm and monotonous step, moved like images of a dream. And so with the mechanism of long habit the work went on.
But one night the semi- stupor that fell upon the tired workers at lighting- up hour was dispelled by a shrill scream. The
LOWER LYMAN STREET.
CHURCH OF OUR LADY OF THE ROSARY.
key, and to break into measures and bars and run like a tune in the head. The long room with its many points of dancing light grew fantastic and dream-like. The figures moving mechanically to and fro, seemed a part of the great machinery that carried the whirling belts and wheels. The spoolgirls, bowing forward and
DWIGHT STREET, FROM DEPOT HILL.
scrub woman came rushing into the room from the elevator hall, toss- ing her bare arms above her head and howling with fright.
The elevator hall, which also served as the girls' cloakroom, was a quiet place just off the spool-room, where the scrub woman was in the habit of comforting herself with a nap after her day's floor scrubbing, before going home. It was a customary thing to see her tilted back on a bobbin box, her head resting against the wall and her bare feet planted firmly on the floor before her, sleeping the sound sleep of physical weariness and mental unconcern.
But she was wide awake enough now. Her black eyes-pretty eyes, perhaps they may have been in days of rosy youth - were staring wild with terror. In her fright her hair had come unbound and hung in a long black cord over her left shoulder.
THE EASTERN CITY.
GROVER STREET.
45
PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN.
A KEEPER OF THE GATE.
The overseer being for the moment out of sight, nearly every employe improved the occasion to rush down the room and enjoy the passing excitement, whatever its cause might be. "Oh, glory be to heaven!" wailed Mrs. Blinn. "Sure, 'twas the dreadful ghost I saw. 'Twas clad all in a long, white grave-shroud, an' its eyes were full
A CORNER AMONG THE MILLS.
of fire, an' its face blazed like the fiery pit below. Oh! Oh! Sorra's the night that I ever saw this fearful thing!" and she threw her apron over her head and moaned and rocked herself from side to side in genuine terror.
"Oh, come now, Mrs. Blinn, don't take on like that. 'Twas only dreamin' you were," said Katie Crippen, trying to remove the apron ; but Mrs. Blinn only clutched it tighter, rocked the harder and groaned louder.
"Sure, an' do you suppose 'twas a raal ghost?" asked Maggie Hayes in an awed undertone.
CANAL STREET.
1
THE BRIDGE OVER THE CONNECTICUT TO SOUTH HADLEY FALLS.
ON THE EDGE OF THE THIRD LEVEL CANAL.
THE FIRST LEVEL OANAL, NEAR THE GATEHOUSE.
46
PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN.
THE SECOND LEVEL CANAL.
AN ALLEY-FROM A WATER COLOR BY MRS. I. H. FERRY.
"Ghost? Pah!" exclaimed Hugh Brett, the old Scotchman who was employed at odd jobs about the room. "More like 'twas a flash of light through the window shinin' on the wall; and wakin' up so sudden it looked quare and scared her."
""Twas a warnin', Mother Blinn, 'twas a warnin' for your sins," presently piped the voice of Sandy Hutton, the spoolboy, pushing his red head in among the group. His eyes were dancing with glee and the corners of his mouth turned upward with the crescent curve they took when he was greatly delighted.
Mrs. Blinn snatched the apron from her head and aimed a quick blow with it at Sandy. It was the surest way that could have been devised to dispel her fright, for there was a chronic feud between the scrub woman and the spoolboy.
BEFORE A SHOP WINDOW.
" Indeed, I believe she'd rise from her dyin' bed to give the boy a lick," remarked Maggie, and this diversion put to flight all serious thoughts of Mother Blinn's scare.
But that was not, by any means, the last of the spool- room ghost.
Sandy Hutton was the only boy working in the spool- room. There were two or three men employed to do the heavy lifting and carting of beams, but all of the spooling and warping frames were operated by girls. Sandy's business was to clear the filled spools from the spooling frames, wheel them in boxes to the warpers and carry back the emptied spools to be refilled. It kept him tolerably busy on the whole, but his active spirit would have missed a great deal of welcome excitement if it had not been for the almost daily skirmishes with the scrub woman and an occasional set-to with Andre Bourdon.
Andre was the boy who rode up from the spinning room on the elevator, to bring up the supplies of bobbins for the spool frames. As he shoved the boxes out into the spool-room from the elevator, he and Sandy seldom missed exchanging remarks, and sometimes more em- phatic compliments, if the overseer was out of sight and hearing.
TWELVE O'CLOCK AT THE HADLEY MILLS.
"Hullo, Scotch !" was Andre's form of greeting.
" Hi, there, Frenchy !" Sandy would hail back.
Sandy was not long out from Scotland, and one day he wore into the mill a pair of Scotch-made shoes that excited the derision of the bobbin boy.
THE KIVER BELOW THE DAM.
4.
PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN
THE OVERFLOW DAM.
"Tacketty feet! tacketty feet!" he called out as Sandy came clattering up the stairs at noon-time; and the rest of the spinning-room boys joined in the cry.
During the afternoon, at every trip up into the spool-room, Andre repeated the jeer, and if the overseer was not too near, Sandy responded with a flying bobbin aimed at Andre's head.
A WOLF'S WEDDING
CHILDRET'S COMFORT
LYMAN STREET, AT THE LOWER CANAL.
Andre had come up on his last trip for the night and had pulled the last box from the elevator, when he caught sight of something that caused him to give a yell of terror. The box went flying to one side of the hall and Andre stumbled into the spool-room shaking and crying, and sank into a collapsed heap on the floor.
JUMPING THE ROPE.
A BROKEN EXPRESS WAGON.
IN A HOLYOKE ALLEY.
THE CITY CENTER, FROM THE LYMAN STREET UPPER BRIDGE.
48 1-
PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN.
FRONT STREET.
"Oh, de ghos', de ghos'!" he howled. "I seen him! I seen him!"
There was plenty of superstitious fear in the spool-room, and the word that Andre, too, had seen the ghost passed around in a shuddering whisper. There was no stampede toward the hall this time, for the overseer was on hand and he had a stern voice and a stern eye.
He lifted the shivering bobbin boy by the collar and gave him a shake that tended to restore his scattered wits.
" What do you mean by such nonsense ?" he asked sharply. "You go back down stairs where you be- long, and don't you come up here again to raise such a screeching as that."
Poor Andre ! He was in hard luck, for when he had sent the bobbin box spinning across the hall, it had hit and upset one of the tall oil cans standing against the wall and the yarn on the bobbins was soaked and spoiled. The quaking lad had to go down and report the accident to his own overseer,. who cuffed him for his carelessness and threatened to dis- charge him if such a thing happened again.
A week or two passed by and the spool-room ghost had become the talk of the
mill. The scrub woman and the bobbin boy had to listen to much sly jesting, but there were many who were disposed to look upon it as a serious matter. The smaller spoolgirls especially showed an earnest avoidance of the elevator hall as soon as the shadows of evening fell, and when they were obliged to go for their cloaks and hats at closing hour they took care to go in the strength of numbers, and to make as brief a stop in the hall as possible.
The talk quieted down at last, and when one night two or three of the warper girls found themselves left the last ones in the spool-room after the speed had stopped, they were thinking nothing about the ghost as they went toward the cloakroom.
All the lights had been turned down, except one burning at the further end of the room and two at the overseer's desk. The cloakroom beyond the elevator was all in shadow.
It was Katie Crippen and Maggie Hayes and Julia Pray who were in the cloakroom together hurrying on their wraps, when suddenly a fearful specter rose before them in the corner. Through the darkness it showed weird and white and ghastly. Over a sheeted form rose the semblance of a face gleaming with a strange, unearthly light, and as it made a movement forward the girls shrieked with horror and ran.
They did not stop till they had reached the bottom of the last flight of stairs, had pushed the door open and were out in the open air. They were all quite hysterical with terror, but there were no signs of pursuit, and they safely reached home.
The story went about the mill the next morning, and there was a set expression on the overseer's face as he proceeded to a thorough investigation of the hall and cloakroom. But nothing unusual was found. There was a long closet, with shelves, on one side of the hall, where the girls stored their hats, and a row
A FRONT STREET CHERUB.
of hooks beyond where they hung their cloaks and shawls. The closet extended up nearly to the ceiling. Back of the elevator was a long sink built solid to the floor. No apparent hiding place for a ghost-player was there.
For a long time after this there was no further alarm. The winter wore away and spring came, and at last the days had grown so long that gas light was no longer needed. On the first day that the speed went down on the unlighted room, the ghost made its final appearance.
One of the smaller spoolgirls saw it. Once more a terrified Shriek rang from the cloakroom and the child came rushing out pale with fright.
The employes, now released from duty by the stopping of the speed, crowded into the hall and the overseer followed.
The foremost of the crowd heard the sound of something like a sudden rush or scramble, but nothing was to be seen but the closed closet and the row of shawls and capes hanging on the wall. The window was open, but no one could have escaped by an opening full forty feet above the ground.
" I'll get a long stick, and if the ghost is in any corner of this hall we'll poke him out of his hole," said Hugh Brett.
Two or three of the girls gave a little scream.
" Oh, ye needn't be scared, girls," said Hugh. "The ghost will be the one to do the squealing when we find him."
The overseer threw down the shawls and cloaks to see if any- thing was concealed behind them. Hugh armed himself with a window pole and began to explore the closet.
There was nothing on the top. It must, indeed, have been a shadowy ghost which could have hidden itself in that narrow space. The opened closet showed the girls' hats and hoods piled in some confusion on the shelves.
"Nothing here ?- wait a bit," said the Scotchman.
Under the lowest shelf, rolled into a corner that would have been cramped quarters for a medium-sized dog, was something that looked like a ball of white cloth. Hugh reached down and gave it a tug.
" If that wasn't a live boy's foot I got hold of, then I'm not a Scotchman," said Hugh. Taking a firmer grasp, the bundle was jerked out upon the floor.
Then from the folds of a large spread of white cotton, such as was used to cover the warps when the mill shut down on Saturday, was slowly unwound the crest-fallen figure of Sandy Hutton -Sandy, his shamed face still showing in the dim light the brim- stone marks that he had not had time to remove. He had played his roguish prank just one time too many.
So the ghost of the spool-room walked no more, for Sandy's place in the mill instantly became vacant, and next day the spool-room of No. 2 had a new spoolboy. * * * * *
*
A few years later, two of the girls who had worked in the mill at time of the ghost scare, happened to attend together a minstrel performance in a neighboring
TRAINING THE DOG IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO.
49
PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN.
SOMETHING BROKEN.
DOORWAY GROUPS-LYMAN STREET.
LYMAN STREET, FROM FRONT.
LOOKING UP HAMPDEN STREET HILL.
UNION STREET.
town. All the familiar tricks of the old-fashioned minstrel show were per- formed, including the hair-raising ghost burlesque and the feats of the lim- ber-jointed fellow who is doubled up and pulled through a barrel. There was something familiar about the movements of one of the cork-blackened performers, but the girls did not recognize him until he came forward to re- spond to a recall after one of his tricks. Then he came out to the front of the stage, looked straight down to the chairs where they were sitting, and when the corners of his mouth went up in a crescent curve, they saw a well- known tace looking through the grease and paint, and knew he was Sandy Hutton.
Sandy had evidently found his true vocation this time. FANNY M. JOHNSON.
A STREET IN " LITTLE CANADA."
50
PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN.
A VISITOR AND HER DOG.
A CORPUS CHRISTI SACRIFICE.
THE BURNING OF THE FRENCH CATHOLIC CHURCH.
On the Corpus Christi festival Catholics love to make their church altars beautiful for the placing of the sacred Host. They drape the altar shelvings with rich laces, hang soft curtains on statues and projections, and place every- where lighted candles. Flowers, too, are everywhere, to make for this day, given to the worship of the body of Christ, one of the most beautiful of the church observances.
In 1875, on Thursday, the 27th of May, just when the year was most delightful, the French people of Hol- yoke were gathered in their church for the Corpus Christi vesper service. The church was small and poorly built - a frame structure, sheathed to the ceiling, with no plastering to make it firm or heavy. At best it was only a temporary house of worship, built so that these many people, who spoke a strange tongue, might have the gospel preached to them in their own lan- guage. Up to five years before they had worshiped with the old St. Jerome society, but they had gathered in num- bers and wealth enough to have their own church and pastor, and Rev. A. B. Dufresne had been sent to them for a religious guide. Under his supervision the little church was begun
AFTER A SNOWSTORM.
A PEDDLER - OLIVER STREET.
narrow galleries that ran around the building. It may have been a breeze from a near window, or some say it was the swaying of a woman's fan that floated the light lace draped over the Virgin's statue too near the lighted candle on the pedestal. In an instant the bit of fire had leaped up the drap- ing. Some of the men who were close by tried to put it out, but the flame was too quick for them. It licked up the curtain and swept on to the thin sheathing, and the building was doomed.
All thought then was for safety - for escape with life and friends. From below there was a mad rush for the main door in front, and most of the people got safely out. But up in that crowded gallery, only eight feet above the floor, were the hundreds of young people who, from three sides of the building, had but one way of escape, and that a narrow four-foot stairway. It could not be the exit for that panic- stricken crowd. People who saw tell of such a rush that where the stairway ended was a mass of people so wedged together that they no longer seemed living beings. Without were ready helpers, but with that packed mass blocking the doorway, the work of rescue was terribly slow, and the heat and smoke did their work almost unchecked. A young fireman on a baseball field near
SIDEWALK SLIDING.
the first of December, 1869, and by New Year's day was ready for service, with just one month's work upon it. Meanwhile the parish grew and a fine new church was going up near by, substantial and well built.
On that warm May night there were six hundred people at the vesper service - a large crowd for the building, that seated only eight hundred. There was to be confirmation in the church the next Sunday, and many children and young people who were preparing for the rite sat in the low,
PLAYING WITH THE BABY.
51
HAMPDEN.
APPLETON STREET, FROM RACE.
A LOAD OF WOOD - HAMPDEN STREET.
THE OPERA HOUSE BLOCK.
by, who a few years later be- came Chief Lynch of the fire department and one of the most skilled firemen in the state, was one of the first to reach the fatally crowded doorway. He pulled forth body after body, this one dead and that one alive, even if the conditions were exactly the same. It is a tri- umph to save one life, and to save many lives, as did the fire- men and some of the men who were in the burning church, must forever make the rescuers men marked among other men.
THE CITY HALL, FROM THE TRACKS OF THE WESTFIELD ROAD.
might have given escape to many. Wrought into the homes and lives of many of the French people living to-day in Holyoke are many sad stories that arose from the fire that claimed from the crowd of wor- shipers seventy-two people and placed lasting marks upon thirty-nine more.
At her seat before the organ, with her hands never removed from the keys, they found Ida Mennier, the organist. She had fainted in the first sudden fright of the panic, and though the smoke had brought suffoca- tion and death, she had not fallen from her seat. One mother had eight children in the building and lost them all. Noticed on the persons of the victims were
Most of the victims were women, but that they died was not because they were weaker GETTING A LOAD OF DIRT. and were overpowered by the stronger, neither that the men shirked at their call. The stories of the bravery that made men go back to the burning building to save a wife or a
LOOKING UP THE TRACKS NEAR THE WESTFIELD DEPOT.
sister, a mother or a child, will never all be told. It is well enough to say that there need not have been such an awful loss of life if there could have been calm or self- possession in the danger. But hu- man beings are not given calm or self- possession in such crises. No one thought of the win- dows or side doors, although they
CABOT STREET.
PICTURESQUE
52
PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN
THE FIRST LEVEL CANAL, NORTH FROM SARGEANT STREET.
NEWTON PLACE.
gleaming jewels, bracelets, rings and brooches, examples of the taste of this beauty-loving people for personal adornment. A watch worn by one woman ticked on through the disturbance that cost her life, and did not stop until four o'clock next morning. One young man escaped, only to mourn his bride of a week before.
Never will the men who worked among them forget the anguish in the cry raised in the French tongue: "Pour l'amour de ceil, sauve moi!" (For the love of heaven, save
READY TO HAVE THEIR PICTURES TAKEN.
CREDIT TO WHOM CREDIT IS DUE.
The large majority of pictures in this volume were specially drawn or photographed for this work, but there have been as well many attractive contribu- tions from outside sources. Some particularly charming work has been done with the camera by William A. Prentiss, and we are fortu- nate in being able to place before the public the photo- graphs which he kindly allowed us to use. Many
of our canoeing pictures are to be credited to Frank Metcalf. Mrs. William Whiting, John W. Dickinson, F. B. Towne and Fayette Smith furnished a variety of clever and pleasing photographs, and many others have lent their aid to whom we can only make a general acknowledgement.
Ex-Mayor Crafts was a valuable help to the literary part of the work in drawing upon his fund of anecdote and memories of Holyoke's early days for the benefit of the work. To Miss Adelaide Moffat and Miss Louise Cable we are indebted for permission to reproduce examples of their paintings. Thanks are due Mrs. 1. H. Ferry, who for some years has been teacher of art in the Holyoke schools, for the quaint water color of one of the city alleys, which we have had engraved for our pages.
ALONG THE CANAL.
me.) But man is kind to his stricken fellows, and scarcely was the terror known throughout the young city when all Holyoke offered its best to the sufferers. Business and manufacturing firms that had lost many of their workers, told their bankers to draw at sight for any amount while help was needed. The Sisters of Charity came, and with training and skill to direct, did noble work. All that the doctors could do and that the mayor and city government could propose, was done.
That was Thursday, and the Saturday following was the day of funeral. From the new and handsome building they were putting up for their sacred place there was made the song and prayer of sad requium for the dead. For all the city it was a day of mourning when the six hearses and twenty-one business teams behind wound their way across the bridge and two miles beyond to the cemetery, where were laid these people almost as strangers in a strange land. The next day was Memorial day, the saddest one that Holyoke has ever known.
M. A. RYAN.
LOOKING UP THE ALLKY.
53
PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN.
FIRST LEVEL CANAL, FROM HAMPSHIRE STREET.
NEWTON STREET.
THE END OF THE FIRST LEVEL CANAL.
THE TINKER AND HIS FURNACE.
A number of the pen and ink drawings of architecture or groups of children are the work of Walter Cox, whose facility in this line is very promising. D. E. Butler, the High street photographer, developed and printed our own artist's pictures, and deserves credit for faithful work.
A REMARKABLE NOSE .- The following advertisement, clipped from an enterprising daily, is of more than ordinary interest : " Run away - A hired man named John; his nose turned up five feet eight inches high, and had on a pair of corduroy pants, much worn."
WASHING DAY.
MILLS ALONG THE FIRST LEVEL CANAL.
54
PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN.
THRIFT.
New England has had two great inspiring minds - Jona- than Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. Far apart in spirit and character, they formed a grand unity in their influence. One taught religion, the other thrift; one clarified theology, the other taught the people how to get on. Edwards tided New England over the infidelity that prevailed in the last century ; Franklin created the wealth that feeds society to-day by inspiring a passion for thrift. Hence, for a century, irreligion and beg- gary were equally a reproach, and still in no country in the world is the latter held so vile.
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