Hopedale History September 1, 2013 No. 235 Model Town - Conclusion Hopedale in August Pictures taken in town during August, with a few bits of related Hopedale history added. The Town Hall Spa, 1940 - 1957 - Memories of Don Handley. Here's a link to a collection of photos (over 85,000) put on Flickr by the Boston Public Library. Most of them are old pictures and posters of Boston and vicinity. Thanks to Peter Menzke for sending it. You've probably noticed by now that there's not as much as usual here. You might be thinking I've been loafing. Don't fire me yet. I'm trying to get all of these ezines on my website. I've added about 40 in the last few days, and hope to have the rest of them on before long. Here's a link to the menu for them. I've also been working on the "obit pages" to get them in better shape, and have added the list from the Hopedale High School Alumni Association for the past year. <><><><><><><><><><> Twenty-five years ago - September 1988 - Hopedale schools, now including the Hartford Avenue School, open with over 900 pupils, an increase of 51 over the previous year. Selectmen consider not renewing lease to Bob and Shirley Mei for Mei's Diner at Town Hall. 75 supporters of the Meis show up at meeting. Lease renewed. Abatement forms filed by 200 Hopedale property owners, upset about method used in evaluating land value. Summer Olympics held in Seoul, South Korea. NASA resumes Space Shuttle flights grounded since Challenger disaster. Fifty years ago - September 1963 - Framework has been started on the housing project for the elderly. The completion date is March. Olga Till, director of the Over Fifty Club, has issued a bulletin of the years activities, including a lecture by a Boston doctor, a trip to Boston to see the movie, Cleopatra, bowling, rug hooking, a bridge class, a Great Books discussion group, and possibly one or more cruises. Four girls killed in church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Pro football Hall of Fame opens in Canton, Ohio. <><><><><><><><><><><><> Model Company Town - Conclusion By John Garner 1982 The following is part of the conclusion to John Garner's Model Company Town. While the book is about five company towns, including South Manchester, Connecticut, Peace Dale, Rhode Island, Fairbanks Village, Vermont and Ludlow, Massachusetts, the majority of it is about Hopedale.
Improvements in illumination, ventilation, and heating indicate practical if not always aesthetic advancements in design. Families of five (the average-sized family in Hopedale) gained nearly three hundred square feet of floor space in a twenty-year interval between the mid-1870s and the mid-1890s, culminating a trend to larger accommodations realized in most towns except in the houses of the poorest families. The average apartment in a double-family house owned by the Draper Company contained fourteen hundred square feet. Although less area than provided in conventional houses today for middle-income families, it is more than allotted to families of five living in public housing. What did not change in Hopedale, or for that matter in most other places right up to the present, is the way in which houses were built. Building trades handcrafted houses then as now. Nothing appears to have been prefabricated in the Bancroft Park houses designed in 1896 except doors, windows, fixtures, and a few items of interior trim. Although housing prefabricators were in business in the nineteenth century, they built in limited quantity and rarely in New England. Had companies constructed their own houses instead of hiring outside contractors, construction methods might have been systematized and the product processed much the same way as a textile loom, a bolt of silk, or a bathroom scale. In outward appearance, the company houses built in Hopedale and its cognate towns managed to express sensible and sometimes pleasing designs. Whether or not their simple form and use of indigenous materials constituted a "national style" of architecture, something sought and partly achieved in the late nineteenth century, seems less important in light of other considerations. The case for well-designed houses rested not with stylistic motifs but with the use of rational space suited to domestic requirements. Furthermore, designing low-cost dwellings forced architects to recognize the fundamentals of good housing, In this regard, Hopedale's houses were exemplary. Comprehensive design entailing maintenance after construction evolved with company towns like Hopedale. A single enterprise controlled construction from beginning to end and was able to coordinate physical expansion with business and employment demand. Factories, houses, community buildings, and parks existed in a manageable number and adequate ratio to provide jobs, shelter, and recreation for workingmen and their families. The desideratum was simply to organize building and space economically and yet attract and sufficiently accommodate a large work force to facilitate business. Some of the design ideas implanted in these towns have been carried forward to the present. Good planning and architecture are timeless, though social and economic motives periodically change. As buildable space diminishes, and as metropolitan regions spread outward to incorporate small towns, attention to urban development will increase. The model company town, for its part, represented a small though seminal achievement in urban design and environmental management. The Draper Duplexes Hopedale History Ezine Menu HOME . . |
perform at the annual Friends of Adin Ballou peace picnic at Ballou Park. August 6. |