Hopedale History
October 2025
No 444
Stagecoach Trip
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Twenty-five years ago – October 2000 – In Aden, Yemen, USS Cole is badly damaged by two Al-Qaeda suicide bombers, who place a small boat laden with explosives alongside the United States Navy destroyer, killing 17 crew members and wounding at least 39.
250 million US gallons (950,000 m3) of coal sludge spill in Martin County, Kentucky, United States (considered a greater environmental disaster than the Exxon Valdez oil spill).
Fifty years ago – October 1975 – “Thrilla in Manila“: Muhammad Ali defeats Joe Frazier in a boxing match in Manila, Philippines. The fight is viewed live by well over 100 million people worldwide.
The last naturally occurring case of smallpox is diagnosed and treated, the victim being two-year-old Rahima Banu in Bangladesh
Juan Carlos I of Spain becomes acting head of state after General Francisco Franco concedes that he is too ill to govern. His death on November 20 effectively marks the end of the dictatorship established following the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of the Spanish transition to democracy.
One-hundred years ago – October 1925 – The US Congress grants permission for Gutzon Borglum to begin constructing Mount Rushmore National Memorial on federal land in South Dakota.
In London, UK, John Logie Baird successfully transmits the first television pictures with a greyscale image.
News items above are from Wikipedia. For Hopedale news from 25, 50 and 100 years ago, see below this textbox.
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Milford to Mendon Trip in the 1870s
By Atty. Wendell Williams
Atty. Williams, who grew up in Mendon, wrote the following article for the Mendon Historical Society. The one below, and five more were published in the Milford Daily News in 1950.
My childhood recollections run back to the early 1870s, as I recall the parades and flags in the 1872 election of Grant as President, the talk and pictures about the Chicago and Boston fires, and the Uxbridge Bank robbery and many other events that stirred people in those days.
However, there was little change in living conditions and the course of life in Mendon until twenty-five or more years later with the development of electricity, the lighting, the trolleys and the telephone. So there are very many whose early recollections of life in Mendon vary little from mine, though much younger in years.
If you had visited Mendon in the seventies of the nineteenth century, very likely you would have arrived by stagecoach from Milford, a large Concord coach drawn by two horses, or sometimes three, which also carried the mail, the driver being Abram Scribner, a not very sociable man or apparently much interested in his passengers. You might have landed at the Post Office and General Store of Henry Aldrich, either at ten o’clock in the forenoon or seven in the evening, and, if so, you might have had an opportunity to observe the driver’s courtesy. You might have observed one day, as I did, a lady alight and trip so that a man standing by stepped forward to help her, and heard our driver remark, “Oh, that’s the way she always gets out” On another occasion, when the stage was leaving the hotel, Mrs. Huston, who was a summer guest there and the donor of funds to establish the public library, remarked as she was boarding the stage that the step “was awful high,: to which our friend Mr. Scribner replied, “You had better not get in and then you won’t have to get out. However, he was all right as a stage driver and only amusing to those who understood him.
The store and Post Office was a sort of social center where men gathered at the seven o’clock mail hour and discussed local affairs and the problems of the day. It was made comfortable with settees and a big coal stove, and the discussions were free for all and unlimited in topic. It was the old-time country store with no delivery. One carried away whatever he purchased. It sold principally groceries, but dry goods and hardware to a limited extent. Few goods were purchased in those days and wrapping paper was scanty and of poor quality. If your mother sent you to the store for a cod fish, you got it from a pile and carried it home by the tail, or, if you preferred, rolled and wrapped in brown straw paper that was pretty sure to be broken, and the contents disclosed before you arrived home. If it was a can of kerosene that you were sent for and the cap happened to be missing from the nozzle, it would be temporarily remedied by sticking a potato on it!
There was another small grocery store on Elm Street that was kept by Captain Sumner Ballou where a small boy could exchange a good clean paper bag for a smoked herring or a stick of candy.
Click here to go to all six of Wendell Williams’s articles.
Hopedale News – October 2000
Hopedale News – October 1975
Hopedale News – October 1925
