ut-built old house were four
spinster and bachelor brothers and sisters. After their death the
homestead went to a relative and eventually was bought by its present
occupant, Mr. Horace Brown. Long before this change took place, Whig,
Federal and Tory had gone to their last rest, and they sleep peacefully
together in the old burial-ground overlooking the river; their
differences ended, their feuds forgotten.

When the Hadley Falls Company began to plan the New City, as for a few
years it was called, negotiations were opened with the farmers living
along the river-bend and occupying the lands which the new company
wished to own. Mr. Geo. C. Ewing was the company's agent, and one after
another the land-owners were persuaded to sell their acres. Samuel Ely
was an exception. He held fast to his land property, but some twenty
years later, when the sandy acres had become a valuable possession,
Samuel Ely sold his farm-lands to Messrs. Bowers and Mosher who surveyed
and sold it as building lots and it is now known as Depot Hill. Mr. Ely
retained through life the old farmhouse where he was born and reared and
where he died in 1879.

[Illustration: THE SOLDIERS' MONUMENT.]

In the Summer of 1848, a dam was constructed across the Connecticut
river by the Hadley Falls Company. It was finished on the morning of
Nov. 16, 1848. A great crowd of ten thousand people collected on the
river-bank to witness the filling of the pond and closing of the gates.
At ten o'clock the gates were let down and the pond began to fill. The
massive foundation stones of the bulk-head at the west end began to move
under the great pressure. The water had risen to within two feet of the
top of the dam when the break began at about one hundred feet from the
east end and the structure tipped over and gave way. A massive wall of
water and moving timbers rose high in air, (a sight terrific to remember
by those who saw it), and with a mighty roar and sweep the great
structure went down the stream in ruins.

Great as this disaster was to the Company, there was no yielding to
discouragement. The work of reconstruction was begun at once and a
second dam of improved pattern was built upon the site and so strongly
constructed that it remains a part of the present dam. Eighteen years
later it was improved and strengthened by building a front extension, in
such a manner that the dam now has a sloping front, giving it the form
of a roof, both the old and the new str