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.
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