Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
Date: 11/8/2021
HOLYOKE – If you’re looking to learn more about the city you call home, the Holyoke Preservation Trust has two upcoming events that can help you rediscover Holyoke’s past.
The trust will be hosting a free walking tour of the Veterans Memorial Park on Nov. 13 from 1 to 2:30 p.m. going through the park’s designation as part of the Hampden Park Historic District and its listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
They are also hosting a High Street Walking tour covering five blocks of businesses and structures on Nov. 21 from 1 to 3 p.m. and planning their second garden tour for the spring of 2022.
Established in 2014, the Holyoke Preservation Trust, located at 92 Race St., is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to preserve Holyoke’s historic and cultural heritage for residents. For the past six years, the trust has been hosting historic tours around the town: churches, cemeteries, canals, reservoirs, parks and streets. They are walking tours, but once in a while the trust will have bicycle tours. The tours take place in both Holyoke and South Hadley; this year, they had one tour in Chicopee.
“We’re always looking for new members and people who are interested in working, researching, and learning more about the city and historic preservation,” Holyoke Preservation Trust Treasurer Olivia Davis Mausel told Reminder Publishing.
Mausel does a Holyoke City Hall tour going through the Historic National Register Landmark. She said, “Holyoke has a deep history of immigrants coming into the city and working the mills. Those groups have a wealth of history that over the years have been lost and people have moved, but they were very prominent here at one time. In the mid 1800s the city was growing rapidly and their population at one point at its highest was 60,000 people.”
Tour guide Bob Comeau has conducted 15 tours in 2021.The Holyoke Preservation Trust is the host for his tour, but Comeau is mostly independent of them and calls his research the Historical Tours of Holyoke. When he does join in with the Trust it is as a gravestone cleaner and as a researcher for their questions.
“They are a wonderful group,” Comeau explained. “To develop a new tour, I walk the area looking for features of interest; on a building, a change in color on the brick might mean an addition, in a reservoir an old trail will lead to a story, in a cemetery a gravestone that is out of the ordinary and in a canal a structure that seems different. Research is then done with old maps, annual city reports, city directories and genealogical information.”
Mausel told Reminder Publishing the tours have gained momentum over the years. The history behind the tours delves back into the early mills of Holyoke and the canal system. Residents, she said, are very interested because they remember their grandparents and great grandparents talking to them about a particular part in town or the mills, they worked in. There are people from all over the Western Massachusetts, as well as those who come from Boston who often join the tours.
The tours are published on Comeau’s website Historical Tours of Holyoke at http://www.holyokecanaltour.org/. There will be 30 tours in 2022. Comeau said about 20 in Holyoke, five in South Hadley and five in Chicopee on http://www.holyokecanaltour.org/holyoke-tours-2022.