Hopedale History March 15, 2005 No. 34 The Road to Hopedale Those of you who lived in Hopedale in the forties and early fifties probably remember Rev. J. B. Hollis Tegarden, the minister at the Unitarian Church. At some point during his tenure in Hopedale, one of the Draper families gave him a Steinway upright piano; it was used in the parsonage at 46 Adin Street for many years and remained in his family after he left Hopedale. A few months ago Rev. Tegarden’s granddaughter, Debbie Tegarden, contacted some people in Hopedale to say her mother was moving and no longer had room for the piano. Debbie expressed a desire to donate it to a public facility in Hopedale where it could be cherished and enjoyed as she truly believed the piano belonged in Hopedale. After months of trying to find a suitable location, Alan Ryan worked with Bill Gannett and Mike DiOrio at the Community House to secure its placement there. The piano will be shipped to Hopedale soon. Historical Commission members and Friends of Historic Hopedale members were able to meet Debbie and her husband, Rod Bass, in January when they drove up from their home in Princeton, NJ, to attend the Crystal Ball as guests of the Friends. Community House members, including Bill Gannett and Kathy Binney, provided Debbie and Rod a tour of the piano's new home the day after the Crystal Ball. <><><><><><><><><><> I recently finished typing Gordon Hopper’s history of the Hopedale Fire Department. It had been printed in the Milford News in 1975 in two parts. I did the first part a while ago, and now you can see the second part at http://www.hope1842.com/firedepthistory1.html In 1936, Lilla Bancroft wrote some memories of her mother, Sylvia Thwing Bancroft. I thought it would make a good addition to the website so I put it on a few days ago. It’s at http://www.hope1842.com/bancroftsylvia.html <><><><><><><><><><> I’m sure some of you have read Hopedale: From Commune to Company Town, by Edward K. Spann, but many probably haven’t, so this time I’m sending part of the first chapter. The book is out of print, but The Friends of Historic Hopedale still have a few copies available. They can be purchased at the Bancroft Library. The Road to Hopedale The Hopedale Community was the most enduring of several efforts in New England during the 1840s to establish the good society in a corrupted world. It was an element in a great socioreligious ferment that inspired thousands of New Englanders to dream anew some version of the old Puritan dream of creating a truly godly community. Although overshadowed by Brook Farm, Hopedale as a social experiment outlived its better publicized rival by a decade. It, too, eventually failed, but only after the power of its governing faith had transformed a barren farm into a successful village – a village that eventually took the search for a good society into drastically different times. That it succeeded as it did resulted not from fortuitous circumstances but from the characters and the visions of the people who created it. Why do such people – only the few – make the risky, difficult and ultimately frustrated effort to establish the City of God in this world? Although the effort might be attributed to some irrational “fanaticism,” the founders of Hopedale were generally rational people committed to a social vision that, while unimaginable to most of their contemporaries, had evolved from their immediate culture and experience during a time of religious ferment. This was especially the case with their longtime leader and spokesman, Adin Ballou, a man of modern reason as well as deep religious devotion. Near the end of his long, creative life, Ballou was discovered by Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist and mystic, who predicted that he would be “in the future acknowledged as one of the great benefactors of mankind.” With this one exception, however, Ballou never achieved much public notice, in part because he spent virtually all his years in a corner of New England that was obscured by the blaze of Boston and Concord and of Lowell and New Bedford. In terms of conventional success, Ballou judged himself a failure. “My hopes were too urgent and sanguine,” he wrote in his Autobiography, “my standard and aim were set too high for immediate realization. So have I been defeated in some of my noblest schemes.” And yet he remained confident that he had, through reasonable deduction from concrete experience, found the God-given religious and social principles whose truth and beauty would ultimately convert the world. Edward K. Spann, Hopedale: From Commune to Company Town, 1 –2. Hopedale History Ezine Menu HOME . |