Program: Colrain - A Sense of Place

Our June 12th meeting will be a brief meeting, dinner, and program at the home of Johnnie Chace, 167 Calvin Coombs Road (the former Dude Ranch), beginning at 5:30 pm. The theme for the night is Colrain: A Sense of Place. 

We hope to take you on a journey where "Sense of Place" becomes not just knowing where you are on a map but the connection you feel when you understand what happened here, who lived here, how they shaped the place -and how the place shaped them. It's when a bend in the road becomes more than a view- it becomes a story. 

Erica Wheeler, singer-songwriter, will guide us through story, conversation, and song on the path to the sense of belonging to our Town. 

Please RSVP to Deborah Jean Wheeler by email at deborahjeanwheeler@gmail . com or by phone at 624-8800 by June 5th. There is no charge for this event; seats are on a first come first served basis.

Postcard showing the former Dude Ranch.

Program: A Walking Tour of Foundry Village

The Cary cider and vinegar works and workers, which operated from 1860 into the 1950s. Photo from the Colrain Historical Society collection.

The Colrain Historical Society will host a walking tour of Foundry Village led by Judith Roberts and Jonathan LaGreze Thursday, May 8, at 7:15 p.m. following a brief business meeting at 7. ​

Site of the first grist mill in Colrain, Foundry Village was a busy industrial center for 200 years. The Langstroth Moveable Frame Bee Hive, still in use by beekeepers today, was first manufactured here. Because of all the industry in this bustling little community, it was electrified by 1910, early for a rural town. ​

Participants will see and learn about the Smith covered bridge, the schoolhouse, the Baptist Church, sites of the foundry, grist mill, turning shop, blacksmith’s shop, and the butcher shop, ending up in the vinegar bottling room of the former Cary Cider Mill for discussion and refreshments. The walk will be only a few hundred yards, and the bottling room is wheelchair accessible. ​

Park at the Baptist Church for the meeting at 7 and the tour to follow. In the event of rain, the tour and meeting will be postponed until Thursday, May 15. To inquire about postponement, call Debby at 413-624-8800 or Belden at 413-625-2003.

Watch For It

At last, spring! As frost leaves the ground behind the Museum, heavy equipment will move in to replace the out-of-code septic system with a tight tank. Next step: structural work to allow the installation of a handicap-accessible bathroom at ground level, which state code requires for a certificate of occupancy. It's been a long haul, and costly. 

While this project winds its way through the bureaucracy, volunteers have labored to inventory, scan and digitize the historical society's collection of artifacts, documents, archival photographs, letters and deeds - nearly 3,000 of them so far - which constitute the material history of Colrain. When they finish their work, we'll know exactly what we have and where it is. Ultimately, this will make possible a museum online for the world to see. 

But first, a physical museum that taps the collection to tell Colrain's story about early settlers, its scattered villages and the men and women, farmers, mill workers, and woodsmen who lived and worked here. We'll show their schools, mills, churches, the clothes they wore and who they were, right up through the 20th century. The Curatorial Committee is working on that too. 

And while all this goes on largely unseen, we'll keep you busy with programs in the Stacy Barn and events through early December. We'll have programs on the history of sheep in Colrain, on a sense of place in Colrain, among other Colrain-focused topics.

Mark your calendar for Sunday, August 3, and an ice cream social with live music behind the museum, celebrating the 100th birthday of a lively CHS member (it's a surprise). 

Our popular "Colrain and the Hilltowns on Canvas" returns for its sixth year with a new display of paintings and drawings of local scenes by known professionals and talented amateur artists, September 19-21. 

And don't miss the Christmas potluck and auction (live and silent) fundraiser at the Shelburne-Buckland Community Center in Shelburne Falls, December 6. You can help us by donating Colrain items, crafts for gifts, antiques and baked goods for sale. Watch for details. 

Coming this fall to a store near you: the Colrain Apple Cookbook, long in the works, with apple recipes from Colrain cooks, photos and a brief history of apples and orchards in Colrain.

(From the Spring 2025 Newsletter.)

Historical Notes 2025

The Spring 2025 edition of Historical Notes, the newsletter of the Colrain Historical Society, was mailed recently.

Click on the photos of the pages below to view a larger image.

Ancient maple tree and fresh daffodils on Adamsville Road in late April 2025.

Revolutionary Donuts

From the April 2025 Special Edition of the Colrain Clarion.

 

Two hundred and fifty years ago, thirty Colrain men marched eastward on the morning of April 20,1775, in response to the conflict between the British and Minutemen at Lexington & Concord. 

These Colrain men were fortified by donuts that their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters had stayed up all night making for them. The story goes "... they camped on the floors getting sleep ... while the women of the neighborhood spent the whole night in cooking and frying doughnuts for them." 

Ten of the Colrain men who marched to Boston April 20th 1775 are buried in four local cemeteries: six in Chandler Hill, two in North River, and one each in Brick School and Christian Hill cemeteries. More info on who these men were and photos of some of the their headstones are here. 

(Thank you Dave Allen!) 

The Colrain Resolves 

Unlike the settlers in the valley, who were almost all of English extraction, Colrain’s Scotch-Irish settlers had no love for the English. Resentments festered, and in January, 1774, at Wood’s Tavern the prominent men of the town gathered and drew up what became known as the Colrain Resolves. 

Predating the Declaration of Independence by 18 months, the six Resolves declare the rights of the individual, objection to taxation without representation, legal authority for independence, the right of the group to self-government, the necessity for action, a listing of specific grievances, the necessity for independence rather than mere reform, and the struggle for independence transcending the individual.

Colrain was ardently patriotic. In 1775, when the alarm rang at Lexington, Colrain Minutemen marched to Boston. Later they served at Ticonderoga and at the Battle of Bennington. Ten percent of Colrain’s population - 198 men - served during the Revolution. 

 (Thank you Belden Merims!)

Article about the event in the Greenfield Recorder.

Barefoot Boys

Howes Brothers photo, courtesy of the Colrain Historical Society.

In this 1894 Howes Brothers photo, men, women and girls worked in the Griswold cotton mills in what became Griswoldville beginning in the 1830s, and in Lyonsville later as well. 

The mills, founded by the remarkable Joseph Griswold and his wife Louisa, were for more than 100 years the town’s largest employer, and its tax base. As demand for its cotton products ramped up during the Civil War, Griswold recruited entire families from Quebec to man the water-powered mills, and built a large brick tenement to house them, later adding many of the houses we see in Griswoldville today. ​

In 1932, the Griswold Mfg. Co. was sold to the Kendall Company, at its peak employing some 500 men and women. Mostly Colrain residents and neighbors, generations spent their whole working lives together in the mills. The company changed hands again in 1986 to a succession of companies, and in 2023, Barnhardt Manufacturing, with 31 employees, closed what was left of the mills.

[Source :  Belden Mirims and the April 2025 issue of the Colrain Clarion.]

June 16, 1932 article in the Greenfield Daily Recorder about the sale of the Griswoldville Manufacturing Company to the Kendall Company.

The Griswold Legacy

Prentice Crosier presents a look at the Griswolds, Colrainers who had vision and energy, and left a legacy we still benefit from today. Wednesday, March 19th at 6:00 p.m. at the Griswold Memorial Library.

Lost Nation film being shown in Shelburne Falls

 Lost Nation, a film by director Jay Craven, will be shown at the Pothole Pictures movie theater in Memorial Hall in Shelburne Falls on Friday, February 21, and Saturday, February 22. Both shows start at 7:30 pm. Jay Craven will discuss the film and answer questions following the Saturday evening show.

Lost Nation was partially filmed in Colrain in April, 2022.

A scene from the movie shot on Adamsville Road on the banks of the West Branch River in Colrain, MA.