History
When Adin Ballou and his followers moved to the Jones farm in Milford in 1842, they were not thinking about a place to bury their dead. They were working hard to grow enough food to eat while constructing a machine shop, a chapel and school, and homes for the thirty families who came to “The Dale” from Mendon to live in religious harmony. But when illness hit the little community, a cemetery became an important edition for these Practical Christians.
In 1845, the residents began looking for a suitable site. The community had recently purchased the Amos Cook estate and found that land to be less rocky than other areas they were considering. “The location was happily chosen as not very far away and yet sufficiently removed from the bustle and toil of our common every-day life,” Adin Ballou noted in his History of the Hopedale Community, adding that the site was “conducive to self-recollection, meditation, and communion with the spirits of those who are ‘not lost but gone before,’ and with the infinite Spirit.”
A few years passed before Ballou’s followers realized they needed to have order in the cemetery. At the January 1848 annual meeting, the Executive Council appointed Adin Ballou “a committee to complete the laying out, plotting, and numbering of the cemetery lots, and to put everything pertaining thereto into proper and permanent form.” Whether or not Rev. Ballou had help ordering the cemetery grounds with pen and paper, he did find help with the heavy work. The men of Hopedale formed an “Industrial Army” to beautify the village, and in 1849 they turned their shoulders the cemetery. Their first order of business was to “cut and grade the Central Avenue of the Cemetery...and as good a road was constructed as could have been expected in three hours.” In December they constructed two bridges on the cemetery’s main road and complained that the weather was “very cold and disagreeable, which greatly lessened the comfort and pleasure of the Army’s labors.” All told, the Industrial Army spent several years working in the cemetery, grading roads, removing rocks, planting trees, burning brush, and pulling up roots.
When the Hopedale community hit a financial snag in 1856 and was all but taken over by George Draper and his brother Ebenezer, one of the things Adin Ballou insisted on saving as community property was the cemetery. The cemetery stayed in Practical Christian hands until, on the 15 th of December, 1873 the Trustees of the Community conveyed the cemetery to the Trustees of the Hopedale Parish, “a religious body formed a few years before.”
In 1887 the town’s Village Improvement Society took on the task of enlarging the cemetery and giving it a more formal landscaped look. The new design may have been done by Warren Henry Manning, a young landscape architect who was working with famed Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted at the time. Manning was a proponent of natural garden design, often selecting to save existing plants and trees and exploit the contours of the environment. Manning also designed the nearby Hopedale Parklands and the landscaping for some of the Draper duplex houses.
That was a pivotal year for Hopedale. George Draper had petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to make Hopedale its own town, separate from Milford, in 1886 and he had gifted a town hall to the new town, which was dedicated on October 25, 1887. Unfortunately, George Draper wasn’t at the dedication. He had lived to see the town he helped grow become independent, but he died before the town hall celebration.
Draper’s funeral in June, 1887 made the national press. Three thousand people attended, including politicians, industrialists, and financiers. The company Draper founded, then called George Draper and Sons, was closed and over 600 workers from Hopedale and Milford followed his body to the Draper tomb in the cemetery. Even Adin Ballou, then in his late 80s, made a “brief address.”
“The public buildings were draped, the bells tolled and the occasion was very impressive,” the Springfield Republican reported on June 12, 1887.
The George Draper family tomb was one of the first mausoleums built in the village cemetery, but it was far from the last. All of Draper’s sons have tombs in the cemetery, although a family feud which began around 1907 forced a separation of final resting sites. Stand in the old section of the cemetery and look around; the impressive granite structures are on separate hills within the older section, a family squabble on very expensive view even today.
But the wealthy of Hopedale spared no expense when it came to their eternal home. Robert Allen Cook, a celebrated Milford architect, was hired to design the stone “tool house” in the center of the cemetery. The small building is a picturesque hip-roofed structure with an eyebrow dormer and ornamental oval windows. It is also unheated and has no electricity, a throwback to an earlier age.
Most of the Draper buildings are now gone but the importance of the family and the wealth generated by their successful textile equipment business is on full view in Hopedale Village Cemetery.