Amherst’s Neighboring Towns: South Hadley

Amherst History Month by Month

This column is the eighth in a 10-part series about towns surrounding Amherst.  Previous columns covered Pelham, Shutesbury, Sunderland, Hadley, Belchertown, Granby, and Leverett.  For a listing of all previous “Amherst History Month by Month” columns, look here. 

South Hadley is made up of two areas that are like distinct villages; in the north, South Hadley Center and South Hadley Falls to the south. South Hadley Center is the part closest to both Granby and Amherst so my focus will eventually be on this area but there is significant history and architecture in South Hadley Falls. The physical setting itself suggests an orientation to the larger Hampden County cities of both Chicopee and Holyoke. And in nearing the end of this series of articles, it is worth remembering that larger area towns are hugely important for their power to attract all sorts of attention (and funding) that smaller towns perhaps do not immediately do. For example, just recently, the Mass Cultural Council awarded Holyoke its own Cultural District, (Amherst has one) a designation showing the city’s “commitment to economic development through creative placemaking, celebrating – and prioritizing – arts and culture and using it as a tool to grow and support the local economy.” 

South Hadley begins its life as part of Hadley, incorporated in the mid-1600s and originally encompassing lands on both sides of the Holyoke range, extending east to areas that later would be incorporated as separate towns such as Granby and Amherst. Hadley’s division into precincts meant that the second of these on the south side of the Holyoke range would eventually peel off (a very modern phrase for an historic trend.). Residents of this precinct petitioned to create their own town, at the same time as folk in Granby did, in 1733. While the town has neither railroads nor interstate highways, both being close by at the time of writing, South Hadley is treasured for two South Hadley Falls features; to the west and south, we can find the ‘urban reach’ of the Kwinitekw River (Connecticut River)  (where the new South Hadley Public Library has now been built. And this southern area is also the site of the “first navigable canal [that employed] a novel system of raising boats for safe passage through [the Great Falls.]” The canal dated from 1795 and took three years to complete. 

A bit of magical realist time travel might take you to the shores of the Kwinitekw River in 1802. You are able to read the news of the day from a printed broadsheet about Pliny Moody who has dug up while ploughing his fields, a sandstone slab with large, bird-like footprints embedded in it. In what is now South Hadley Center, Elihu Dwight, a Hadley physician, then living in a house on the grounds of what would later become Mount Holyoke College, acquires this slab of fossil prints. He calls them a sign, the embodiment of “Noah’s Raven,” (such an evocative phrase, entirely in keeping with what would be the Victorian upper-class frame of mind) which is of course, totally false, Later, Dwight sells the “find” (such a fraught word for anyone indigenous) to geologist Edward Hitchcock (1793-1864). As well as being a geologist, Hitchcock was also to become a professor. In 1821 while they were both living and working at Deerfield Academy, Hitchcock married Orra White (1796-1863).  In 1825 Edward was hired to work at Amherst College and he and Orra lived in the house pictured below.

The Hitchcocks bring the slab of fossilized dinosaur prints with them to Amherst where it is later on display at the college’s Beneski Museum of Natural History.  

Anyone sharp-eyed would have experienced, remembered, or noticed tensions between indigenous peoples and the newer white settlers to this region. Tension, and serious clashes and conflict, in the 1600s between wealthy Connecticut merchants seeing land prospects to the north and remaining Pocumtuc and Nipmuc already persisted here. A century separates King Philips War (1675-78) from the late 1700s and early 1800s, but very different attitudes amongst groups of settlers and remaining groups of local First Peoples leave their own marks, not necessarily seen in the colonial and early nineteenth century architecture we can see today. To native peoples here, the land was a sacred being, animated by spirits that supported life in all its forms. To the colonists, the land and its environs was ripe for a European idea of ownership, “improvement,” and “enlightened” management. I work to rid myself of this legacy but it’s there.  

There is also a lingering religious aspect to this history that is troubling: the land in what is now South Hadley was considered “unsettled,” a term that ignored the presence of native peoples and instead suggested that it was uninhabited, needing only a Christian minister to “settle” the area and form a meeting house. In 1721 this process had begun to occur in this part of what was then Hadley. The first part of South Hadley to be developed as a residential rather than an industrial area, was the area marked out by the Bachelor Brook running west to the great river, that is now known as Woodbridge Street. More about that area shortly. By the second half of the l8th century, the area was also served by a ferry across the river to Northampton at Hockanum, an Algonquian word meaning ‘hook’ or ‘hook-shaped’ identifying where the river made noticeable bends.

And, as mentioned already, in 1795 a new canal, skirting the Great Falls (aka, South Hadley Falls) provided river access for nascent industrial development in the area. Colonial governance was given a legal framework established by the General Court (of the English Crown) as separate from Hadley in 1753, and South Hadley was incorporated with representation to the General Court in 1775. The canal, the ferry, and the central area in between would become places of further development after the Revolution. 

Mount Holyoke Seminary was built in 1836-7 close to a mostly residential area that is now known as the Woodbridge Street Historic District. Here, home lots originally created by colonial settlers as narrow strips were often combined into farm-sized parcels. Joseph White, an assessor and selectman, who was a weaver by trade, built his home on four home lots along “the road to Hadley over Bachelor’s Falls.”  The house still stands, in the back of a larger late eighteenth-century home. circa (around) 1790.    

The ‘center’ of South Hadley was the place where Mary Lyon (1797-1849) of Buckland founded her female seminary, which later became the country’s first women’s college, Mount Holyoke College. It was granted its seminary charter in 1836, and its collegiate charter in 1888. 

Amherst was–and  still is–accessed from South Hadley via Woodbridge Street that begins at the intersection of Route 116 with interesting architecture all around: the modernist-designed local post office (#1 Hadley Street), St, Andrews Episcopal Church (Woodbridge St.) and the Fourth Congregational Church (1, Church Street/College Street) that borders the Mount Holyoke campus.

The post office was built in 1940 as part of a federal employment program and was designed by Springfield architect Leo J. Pernice who passed away this year. Pernice was a devotee of the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and completed many federally- and state- supported building projects, including this one. The brick building has a commanding portico that fronts the town common, made of limestone piers and granite steps

The town common is also the location of eleven multi-level buildings that make up Village Commons, designed by the firm of post-modernist architect Graham Gund in 1989. Some friends of mine think it looks a bit like Disneyland, which is a telling comparison as parts of Orlando’s famous entertainment site were also designed by post-modernist architects. Historically, a village commons had existed before Gund’s exuberant and playful new designs came into being. There had once been an inn and other places to stay for the families of the young women attending the college across the street. By the mid-twentieth century, there was a popular venue called Glesman’s Pharmacy that had a soda fountain, on the common, a much-loved institution by all Mount Holyoke college students. And a beloved South Hadley Center landmark. 

In 1957, “Glessies” added a bookstore managed by Romeo Grenier that was called Odyssey Bookstore. The original bookstore sustained a major fire in 1985, but lives on as a key tenant of the revived 1989 era Village Commons, alongside a new movie theater.

Contrasting with the Gund development, South Hadley Center’s common is also home to the oldest public building in the town, although it is now heavily altered. It was first a colonial meetinghouse dating from 1732, which meant it was originally intended to serve the population of the south precinct of Hadley. When a new meeting house was built in 1762, the older building was moved to a spot a bit north on the common. By the early 1900s the structure was called the Old Meeting House Tea Room, then later it served as a restaurant. It is called the Yarde Tavern today.

If you had turned down Ferry St in the past, heading towards the river you would have found “Gagne’s” a business selling used cars and lawnmowers out of a streamlined modern storefront.  

If you keep going west and north on Hadley Street all the way to the riverfront, you can still see a narrow gorge called the Pass of Thermopylae, named for an ancient Greek site made famous in the Greco-Persian Wars (494-449 BCE).

Some Outcomes of Philanthropy in South Hadley 

Social Housing: In 1890, a small group of women in Holyoke wanted to augment the availability of permanent, stable housing options for the elders in their town. After the organization was chartered in 1902, the group set up the Holyoke Home for Aged People in 1911 with 2 acres of land donated by William Loomis. They called the home Loomis House. The image below shows what it looked like, a wonderful example of the Queen Anne/Shingle style. 

Since the late 1960s there has been a restructuring of the Loomis Communities as they are now known, and the development has become known as Loomis House-Holyoke, located near the historic Scott Tower on the edge of the city. And since 1988, there has also been a Loomis House-South Hadley, built on land that used to be a Christmas Tree farm on thein the western side of the town. It is not far from the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts charter school. Loomis also manages Applewood in South Amherst.

Museums: Joseph Allen Skinner was a local silk mill owner and philanthropist who left money to Mt. Holyoke College. He was what is called a “gentleman” farmer and built a summer cottage at #48 Woodbridge St that is now a music school.  He also funded and orchestrated the move to South Hadley Center of the town of Prescott’s old schoolhouse and church when these buildings were about to be submerged due to the creation of the Quabbin Reservoir. To manage his vision, he bought other houses on the east side of Woodbridge St all the way up to Amherst Road. He created a mini-town common off Woodbridge Street where he repurposed the Prescott church as a museum, exhibiting his personal collection of antiques. The museum is now managed by Mt Holyoke College.