In the year 1847, this territory embraced by the river-curve had fourteen houses, a grist-mill and one little shop.  There was also a small cotton-mill.  From the river, the land rises to the westward, and a mile or more back, on the highway leading from Northampton to Springfield, were two hamlets of farmhouses.  Many of these are still standing and are all that this very modern city can show as memorials of a past generation.  From the year 1786 the section had been known as “Ireland or Third Parish of West Springfield.”  It had its two little white meeting-houses, Baptist and Congregational, a modest academy of learning, a country tavern, and its full quota of New England customs, traditions and ideas.  Nine daily stages passed over this highway.  Families moving from one river-town to another usually transported their goods by the flat-boats on the river.

Many of the homesteads had been in the same family name for generations.  Ely, Chapin, Day, Hall, Rand, Humeston and Street were some of the names of early settlers handed down with the family acres from father to son, and their graves crowd the rural cemetery beyond the Baptist Village in the southern outskirts of Holyoke.  The name of Chapin abounded most on the East side of the river along the fair meadows of “Chicopee Street.”  In the first church built there all but eleven of the forty-three original members bore the name of Chapin.

On the A Vest side of the river the Elys were most numerous.  The oldest house now standing in Holyoke was an Ely homestead.  The farm was held in the family for generations and was the home of Enocn Ely, a revolutionary soldier.  He fought in the war of the Colonies against Great Britain, and afterwards took a part in the short-lived Shay’s Rebellion to resist the taxes imposed after the war.  Party spirit was hot and high, and in the rout of the insurgents Ely took to the woods and remained in hiding while the commander of the pursuing party, gratified his feelings by firing bullets into the front doors of Ely’s house.  These old double-doors with the bullet marks showing in them were replaced by new ones some years ago, but the original doors still exist in a small dwelling-house on the Plains.

[Illustration:  THE DAM AS IT APPEARED IN 1843.]

The last of the Elys to occupy this stout-built old house were four spinster and bachelor brothers and sisters.  After their death the homestead went to a relative and eventually was bought by its present occupant, Mr. Horace Brown.  Long before this change took place, Whig, Federal and Tory had gone to their last rest, and they sleep peacefully together in the old burial-ground overlooking the river; their differences ended, their feuds forgotten.