By Jacqueline T. Lynch, Vice President
July 4, 1851 was the 75th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
There were 31 states in 1851. Millard Fillmore was President, the last Whig party president, who succeeded to office after the death of Zachary Taylor, and left the position of vice president vacant.
Between the years 1826, when we celebrated our 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and 1851, we lost 16 more Revolutionary War veterans, including Colonel Abel Chapin, who ran a tavern on the west side of Chicopee Street. He was also a farmer who raised cattle. The tavern would be demolished around the time radio station WACE was built in 1946.
Capt. Joseph Griswold, mentioned in last week’s post, died at 73. Dr. Amos Skeele passed at the age of 91. He had continued in his medical practice until he was over 80 years old. His granddaughter, Clara Skeele Palmer (1830-1911), would one day write Annals of Chicopee Street, giving us a wonderful sketch of our early settlers.
There were three remaining Revolutionary War veterans in 1851, all around the age of 90. They were Thomas Frink, who was a local boy, married Sylvia Pendleton in South Hadley (his mother was also a Pendleton), and then moved away to New York State after the war. He had served in Rhode Island, and at the Battle of Brandywine in Pennsylvania. He would die the following year of 1852.
Rev. Jonathan Smith was originally from Norton, Mass., and fought in the Battle of Long Island, and served in Rhode Island, where he first settled after the war and became a Baptist minister. He married three times, and eventually came to Chicopee late in life to live with his adult children. He would die in four years’ time, in 1855, at the age of 93. He is buried in the Maple Grove Cemetery.
Reuben Burt was originally from Brimfield and served with the 3rd Massachusetts Regiment from 1779-1780. He also lived with adult children late in life here in Chicopee, and would die in nine years, in 1860, just shy of his 100th birthday. He is buried in the East Street Cemetery.
Chicopee had separated from Springfield in 1848, three years prior, and by 1851 we had a population of over 8,000 people. Both Chicopee Falls and Cabotville had been developed into industrial centers, and village life on Chicopee Street was no longer the focus of commercial enterprise.
The railroad had come to town by then. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing, and Yankee mill girls who had been recruited from Vermont and western Massachusetts towns by factory agents were steadily being replaced by large numbers of immigrant Irish. By the end of the decade, over 60 percent of the mill workers in Chicopee were Irish.
We experienced another war; the Mexican War in the late 1840s, and though numbers of Chicopee men who might have participated are difficult to determine, that conflict was the making of the Ames Manufacturing Company, which produced arms and was famous for its swords. Within ten years, we’d find ourselves in a larger, more brutal war that severed the nation. It is remarkable to think that Reuben Burt was present at the founding of the nation and was within eight months of being alive to witness the Civil War.
In 1851, being a special anniversary as the 75th year of Independence, we celebrated in ways a little more familiar to us. There was a parade, still called a procession, in Springfield, but the planned fireworks shot off in a lot on the corner of Main and Bridge streets, with a brass band accompanying the display, had to be postponed a couple days due to rain on the evening of the 4th. When it finally happened, it drew a large crowd, with extra trains from outlying towns.
The Springfield Republican noted of the Springfield celebration, “No accident happened during the day, and there were less drunkenness and fighting than usual on such occasions.”
Less drunkenness, perhaps. However, it was also reported that “A parcel of rowdy boys re-celebrated the Fourth, late in the evening, by building a bonfire of stolen store boxes [at Court Square] and getting drunk at our unlicensed groggeries.”
Next week – 1876 – the 100th celebration of the Declaration of Independence.
Sources:
Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War (Boston: Massachusetts Office of Secretary of the State; Wright and Potter Printing Co., State Printers, 1896).
McKinstry, Winthrop. Glimpses of the Past. (Chicopee, MA; 1978).
Shlakman, Vera. Economic History of a Factory Town – A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts (NY: Octagon Books, rept. 1969)
Springfield Republican, July 4th, 7th, 9th, 1851.
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