Families moving from one river-town to another usually transported their
goods by the flat-boats on the river.

Many of the homesteads had been in the same family name for generations.
Ely, Chapin, Day, Hall, Rand, Humeston and Street were some of the names
of early settlers handed down with the family acres from father to son,
and their graves crowd the rural cemetery beyond the Baptist Village in
the southern outskirts of Holyoke. The name of Chapin abounded most on
the East side of the river along the fair meadows of "Chicopee Street."
In the first church built there all but eleven of the forty-three
original members bore the name of Chapin.

On the A Vest side of the river the Elys were most numerous. The oldest
house now standing in Holyoke was an Ely homestead. The farm was held in
the family for generations and was the home of Enocn Ely, a
revolutionary soldier. He fought in the war of the Colonies against
Great Britain, and afterwards took a part in the short-lived Shay's
Rebellion to resist the taxes imposed after the war. Party spirit was
hot and high, and in the rout of the insurgents Ely took to the woods
and remained in hiding while the commander of the pursuing party,
gratified his feelings by firing bullets into the front doors of Ely's
house. These old double-doors with the bullet marks showing in them were
replaced by new ones some years ago, but the original doors still exist
in a small dwelling-house on the Plains.

[Illustration: THE DAM AS IT APPEARED IN 1843.]

The last of the Elys to occupy this stout-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