November 15, 2008 Hopedale History No. 120 Under One Roof Hopedale in November   Thanksgiving in the Hopedale Community   In addition to all the Hopedale stories since No. 84, I have added the first eleven to my Hopedale history website. Click here for the menu. The Last Green Valley   The Quinebaug-Shetucket National Heritage Corridor. Here’s another find by Peter Metzke - Taking the Town. It’s about the Kentucky aristocracy in the Lexington area from Reconstruction to the First World War. The entire book is online, and one chapter features Margaret Wickliffe Preston (starting on p. 195), niece of the wives of General William F. Draper and George Albert Draper. (More on the six Drapers who married women from the Lexington area.)  And here’s a link to Peter’s site. It’s loaded with information about New England mills and shops, including nearby ones such as Whitin, Fisherville, and Manchaug.                                                     <><><><><><><><><><>                                                  Under One Roof I have stated that the number of those resident upon the Community domain April 1, 1842, was twenty-eight. These were all congregated and living together as a combined household in the old dwelling already mentioned, a portion of which had been standing about one hundred and forty years and the remainder more than a century. Several of them were entire strangers to each other and scarcely any of the families had been more intimately acquainted than as occasional visitors of one another, occupants of adjacent buildings, or worshipers together at the same house of public religious service. A few of us had enjoyed personal, domestic, social, and educational advantages open to the respectable middling classes of New England. But the larger number had lived and moved on a humbler, but in no wise dishonorable, level. There was, naturally, a corresponding diversity of manners, habits, and tastes, in addition to the varied personal peculiarities of each individual. These manifold dissimilarities, and sometimes incongruities, though all our adult population had confessed the same fundamental truths, objects, and duties, had to be harmonized and reconciled, so that all would work together with as little attrition or confusion as possible for the common good and the accomplishment of the great end we all nominally had in view. One third of our residents were children and youth, from the very beginning onward, and many of the characteristics of these needed important modifications or transformations.  Yet we were all domiciled under one roof, lived as one family, stocked a common larder, spread and sat at a common table, organized common industrial activities, placed our children under common regulations and restraints, and constituted to all intents and purposes a Community in fact as well as in name. But how limited were our accommodations and conveniences! They were none too ample of the needs of two middling-sized families of working people. We had only a single, old-fashioned, two-story house, with a time-beaten ell in the rear containing simply a kitchen, which possessed the most inadequate facilities for cooking, laundry work, and other ordinary domestic uses! Next to the kitchen, in the main building, was a long narrow apartment for our common table, and a pantry adjacent. The large west room in front we made a general sitting-room, while the corresponding east one served as a parlor, a council hall, and a place of worship, as stated, and a guest chamber for visitors, having in it a folding bed of a rude sort and other conveniences. These, with a small entry and a few cupboards, were all that had place on the lower floor. The second story was partitioned off into as many lodging rooms as was practicable, and likewise the attic. The President, his wife, and little boy, occupied a small bed-chamber at the northeast corner of the house, which was crowded with their indispensable personal effects and which served as a study and office wherein to prepare editorials, records, documents, and memoranda of various kinds requisite to the satisfactory prosecution of his multiform labors. This, too, was his only indoor retreat and place of refuge from the general din. Ballou, Adin, History of the Hopedale Community, pp. 71 – 73. After about a year, Community families began building their own homes. Decades later, as the Draper business grew, more room was needed for shops, and the Old House was razed in 1874. All that remains is a breadboard made from a piece of it. It’s at the Little Red Shop. Click here for more on the early days of the Community, and here for the memories of Sarah Daniels, who was two years old when hers became the first of the Hopedale Community families to move into the Old House.                                                 <><><><><><><><><><> Recent deaths: Deceased Alumni - Hopedale High School Alumni Association Spring 2008 list. Arthur Allen, 88, October 28, 2008, HHS 1938. In 2002, when we were working on the book of old Hopedale photos, Arthur loaned us a box of glass slides of Hopedale scenes. The pictures had been taken by William H. Barney between 1890 and 1910. We used about fifty of them in the book. Recently, Arthur’s family donated the slides to the Hopedale Historical Commission. Robert M. O’Connell, Sr. 88, Milford, November 2, 2008. Josephine M. (Oddo) Sgalia, 86, Wrentham, November 2, 2008. Harriette E. (Whitney) Mullen, 77, Nobember 4, 2007. Robert J. Manguso, 71, November 7, 2008. Annie (Wilson) Wilson, 91, November 8, 2008, HHS 1935.                                        Hopedale History Email Menu               HOME