Chair City of the World

By Constance Riley

From the Introduction - 

This is the story of more than a century in the life of the Timpany, McConnell, Riley, and LaRoche families against the background of the rise and fall of the chairmaking industry in Gardner, Massachusetts. It is a family and social history of people moving from one country to another, showing who we were and who we became. It is a local history as well, providing a rich picture of Gardner's everyday life and special moments in time. Gardner, Massachusetts, is located in Worcester County, not far from the New Hampshire border. In 1785, just before the town of Gardner was incorporated, there were sixty families living within what would become its boundaries.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HTMPublishing
• Release date: Sep 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201788759

Book preview

Central St., Gardner MA. Note the various means of transportation: electric car on left; center, horse and buggy; Model T on right.

Copyright © 2008 by Constance Riley. Copyright of The Paternal Line of Henry Terry Leo LaRoche and of the LaRoche-Rognon Family Ten Generation Straight Line Chart belongs to Kathleen S. LaRoche.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008906586

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4363-5846-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The quote from Expect a Miracle is used with permission from the author, Dan Wakefield. David Tebaldi, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy, gave permission to use the quote from Mass Humanities. The quote from Writing Down the Bones, © 1986 by Natalie Goldberg, is reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc.

To order hardcover copies ot this book, contact: Xlibris Corporation 1-888-795-4274.

Dedicated to the descendants of the Timpany, McConnell, Riley, and LaRoche families: my children, Kathleen, James, Thomas, David, Mary Ellen, Margaret, Christopher, and Michael LaRoche; my grandchildren, Carson Fiske, Matthew Roy, Eric Lupaczyk, Katie, Timothy, and Carly LaRoche; my great-grandchildren, Zachary and Ainsley Fiske

The love of place, of the ground we grew up on, the scenes we call home, is powerful and sacred.

—Dan Wakefield Expect a Miracle

It is important to say the names of who we are, the names of the places we have lived, and to write the details of our lives. We were here; we are human beings, this is how we lived. Our lives are at once ordinary and mystical.

—Natalie Goldberg Writing Down the Bones

To a great extent it is from work that we derive our sense of identity, our status in the community, our livelihood, and our sense of relatedness to others . . . One of the primary needs of people in towns affected by the decline of traditional industries is to understand what has happened to them as individuals and groups.

—Mass Humanities, 1988

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Coming to the States: McConnell and Timpany Families

Growing Up in South Gardner: Timpany and Hutchinson Families

Living in an Ethnic Patchwork: Bernice Rebecca Timpany

A Noisy Arrival: Timpany and Riley Families

Gathering of The Clan

We Whiled Away the Hours

Baked Beans on Saturday Night

Grampa’s Legacy

My Second Home

The South Gardner Rascals

The Outsider

On the Road

Break a Leg

The View from the Soda Fountain

Number, Please

Kids, Kids, and More Kids: Riley and LaRoche Families

The American Dream: A Home of Our Own

The Sixth Generation: LaRoche, Fiske, Lupaczyk, Roy

Chair City Finale: Take a Seat

Gardner Chairmakers 1805-1960

Mayors of Gardner, Massachusetts

Black/Native American Indians Gardner Marriages and Family Patterns

The Paternal Line of Henry Terry Leo LaRoche

Works Cited and Other Sources of Information

Noted Ancestors of Constance Riley

Additional Noted Ancestors:

Ahnentafel: Constance Louise RILEY

Ahnentafel Sources

Preface

From the time, in the fifth grade, when I won a PTA essay contest entitled My Dad, I wanted to be a writer. Much later in life, I pursued this goal through courses at Monty Tech, Mount Wachusett Community College, UMass-Amherst, and Daytona Beach Community College.

Writing tales of my childhood prompted a desire to combine my personal story with the history of Gardner from the perspective of my family’s experience through several generations, from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. I offer the result for my family and anyone who might want to know about life in the small New England community that became the Chair City of the World . To the stories of grandparents and relatives of early generations, I’ve added incidents from the lives of myself, my children, and my grandchildren. I also pass along my passion for politics and a just and peaceful world.

As the book took shape, I invited my daughter Kathleen to contribute her LaRoche family history paper and genealogical chart. I decided to add my own genealogical research, showing connections through Nova Scotia and back to Massachusetts and the Mayflower. In addition, I was given permission by Reggie Chandler to include documentation of his extended Gardner family in his compilation of Gardner Marriages and Family Patterns of Black/Native American Indians.

Acknowledgement is due to assistance from the words and works of Gardner historians Warren Sinclair, Windsor Robinson, Tom Malloy, and Mike Richards; to Esther Gilman Moore’s History of Gardner, especially for her chronology of furniture manufacturers; to Howard Klash, Jr., James Wallgren, and Reggie Chandler for their knowledge of black and Native American forbears; to Roger Casavant for Franco-American information; and to Toni Dahir for her contribution about Lebanese immigrants.

I appreciate the knowledge gained from Andrea Moore Kerr’s book, Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality.

Thanks to Leon LaPlante for his information about Gardner’s Big Chairs; to Margaret Kelly and Elizabeth Tarpey of the Gardner Museum; to Gail Landy and Pam Meitzler of the Levi Heywood Memorial Library; and to the library trustees for permission to publish Harrison Cady’s work (which reminds me of South Gardner’s Bent’s Pond.) Also, I feel fortunate to be allowed to use Marjorie Hutchinson’s letter about her childhood in Gardner.

Levi Heywood Memorial Library

Businessmen Carlton Nichols of Nichols & Stone, Mel Ostroff of Standard Chair, and Leonard Curcio graciously provided me with information about the chair industry. Thanks to Richard D. Baker for his photo of the latest Big Chair and Mark Hawke for sending me pictures of the town and city halls. Thank you to Pamela Boudreau for her layout and design work and to June Williams for genealogical research. Thanks also to my daughter, Kathleen Sheila LaRoche, for her herculean assistance in editing and research. My daughter Margaret Ann Derezinski and her husband David provided invaluable technical assistance.

The Paternal Line of Henry ‘Terry’ Leo LaRoche Traced Back to France and Described in Historical Context and the LaRoche-Rognon Family Ten Generation Straight Line Chart are included with permission of my daughter Kathleen. Conversation with my grandson Eric Lupaczyk helped me to select an appropriate title for the book. Chair City of the World. Isabel Demmon contributed Take a Seat to the last chapter title. The stories A Lost W oman Is Found, Attic Treasures for Sale, and Grampa’s Legacy were previously published in Tapestries, an anthology of LIFE, a program of Mount Wachusett Community College.

Introduction

This is the story of more than a century in the life of the Timpany, McConnell, Riley, and LaRoche families against the background of the rise and fall of the chairmaking industry in Gardner, Massachusetts. It is a family and social history of people moving from one country to another, showing who we were and who we became. It is a local history as well, providing a rich picture of Gardner’s everyday life and special moments in time.

Gardner, M assachusetts, is located in Worcester County, not far from the New Hampshire border. In 1785, just before the town of Gardner was incorporated, there were sixty families living within what would become its boundaries. Because they had to travel long distances over bad roads to church and town meetings in either Westminster, Winchendon, or Ashburnham, these folks petitioned the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to take land from those towns plus a small amount from Templeton to form a separate township.

The town was named after a Revolutionary hero. Colonel Thomas Gardner, who was mortally wounded in the Battle of Bunker Hill. Two local men present on the Breed’s Hill battlefield were Ebenezer Bolton and David Foster. Some reports say that Lieutenant Seth Heywood was also stationed on the Hill.

The Industrial Revolution, which started in England in the eighteenth century, reached Gardner in the year 1805 when James Comee began making chairs. By the late nineteenth century, with the use of waterpower and improved machinery, jobs in chair factories promised more prosperous lives to Gardner residents and drew immigrants from other countries. At that time, my Canadian ancestors came to Gardner to earn a living in the chair and toy shops.

My great-grandfather Albro McConnell left a life of subsistence farming by the sea in Nova Scotia, Canada, to enter a new country and better his lot.

My grandfather James Timpany was swept up by the same wave, also moving from farm to factory. The lives of the McConnell and Timpany families, which merged with the wedding of my grandparents, became woven into the fabric of Gardner’s society.

My father, James E. Riley, married a Tim pany and I married a LaRoche.

My father came to Gardner from Vermont to work for the railroad, vital to the chairmaking industry, and the LaRoches came from Canada to work in the factories.

My stories chronicle my family’s life through the ups and downs of the Industrial Revolution, World War I, the Depression of the 1930s, World War II, the Vietnam War, the nuclear build-up of the Cold War years, the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s, and the loss of most of Gardner’s furniture factories. They tell the story of six generations, starting in 1869. My daughter Kathleen shares in great detail her research into her father’s Franco-American/French-Canadian background to round out the picture of our extended family.

Coming to the States:

McConnell and Timpany Families

My great-grandfather Albro McConnell emigrated from Nova Scotia, Canada, to Gardner, Massachusetts, in 1869, about eighty-four years after the incorporation of the town. In the town’s Valuation and Taxes account of 1869, Albro was assessed a poll tax of $2.58. His brother Andrew appears for the first time in the 1870 list. By 1879, Albro McConnell was a homeowner who paid taxes of $21.91 on a house, barn, and a half acre of land on Mechanic Street in South Gardner Village.

Albro McConnell 1844-1888

Albro went back to Nova Scotia in 1872 to marry Rebecca Rand of Weston, Kings County. They returned to Gardner where their first child, my grandmother Jennie Maud McConnell, was born in 1876. She was given the same middle name as her cousin Mary Maud, who was a daughter of Andrew McConnell and Caroline Armstrong. In 1872, Mary Maud McConnell lived on Kendall Street, South Gardner, in the former home of first settler Elisha Jackson. This house, which in the early years became Jackson’s Tavern, was built in 1764 in the wilderness of Narragansett No. 2, a tract of land promised to soldiers who fought in King Phillip’s War. Elisha’s four hundred acres were originally granted to his grandfather, Edward Jackson of Woburn.

My Canadian ancestors came to Gardner to earn a living in the chair factories. Albro worked as a chairmaker at A. & H. C. Knowlton & Co., one of fifteen wood shops in the community in the 1870s. In Ridley’s Directory of Gardner for 1872, the town’s population was listed as 3,500. By 1885, Gardner’s population had grown to 8,000 inhabitants living in over 1,100 dwelling houses.

About this time, Jennie McConnell attended West Broadway School where her cousin M. Maud McConnell was a teacher. During the year of 1887, Miss McConnell was paid a total of $280 for teaching grades 1 and 2. To reach West Broadway School, Jennie walked from her home on Mechanic Street onto Conant Street, which brought her to West Broadway. Her house was surrounded by thick woods although it was not far from the Conant Street circus grounds or from the railroad depot.

When the Vermont and Massachusetts Railroad came through in 1844, the tracks made a clear demarcation between North and South Gardner. Besides trains, other means of transportation at the time were horses and oxen. In winter, teams of oxen were used to stomp down the snow to clear the roadways. Some people wore rackets on their feet to walk on the snow.

In 1785, at the time the town was founded, a meetinghouse was erected in the north end for both church services and town meetings. That part of the town was called Gardner Centre. It was also the location of the District Court, two banks, Stratton Bros.’ dry goods store, Harrison Cady’s novelty shop, a drugstore, a jeweler’s establishment, a barbershop, and G. R. Godfrey Co., manufacturer of harnesses and other leather goods. Even so, nearby Green Street was called a howling wilderness.

The village of South Gardner was a bustling community. The first post office was located there. Many businesses such as S. W. A. Stevens’s Dry and Fancy Goods, Whitney and Kendall’s Livery Stable, and Brown’s Drugstore served the needs of the residents.

In 1869, West Gardner, which later became the business center, had only one store, run by Frank Conant. That part of town from Osgood Street to the lower end of Parker Street was an area of pasture and woodland. All of Washington Hill was farmland owned by Uncle Billy Lynde.

The Gardner News was first published as a weekly, starting July 3,1869, the year my great-grandfather McConnell came to town. An article in an August issue named Albro McConnell as a newly elected officer of the International Order of Good Templars. The lO of GT was a society whose members abstained from alcohol.

A local contemporary of Albro, chairmaker and surveryor Aaron Greenwood recorded his daily activities in a diary. He mentioned that the chair factory ran only when the brook was high enough to provide waterpower. My great-grandfather, like Aaron, may have had time to plant a garden, hunt birds, and fish for perch and horned pout to provide for his family. It was astonishing to read that robins were shot and stewed or baked for a meal.

Perhaps Albro and Rebecca availed themselves of books from the South Gardner Social Library. Abljah Severy, a stagecoach driver, left $500 in his will so that the interest could be used to buy books. Also, in 1871, the Young Men’s Christian Association opened a reading room on South Main Street, it wasn’t until 1886 that the Levi Heywood Memorial library was established on Pearl Street in Gardner Centre.

In the evenings, Albro and Rebecca may have attended the entertainments arranged by the Village Improvement Society of the South Village. Possibly, they also went to concerts and plays at the town hall in Gardner Centre. The Gardner Institute presented such offerings as Hi Henry’s Minstrels, East Lynn, Barnum with Tom Thumb, and African explorer Paul Belloni du Chaillu. If Albro was interested in baseball, he could have watched the game played in South Gardner between the Flying Bats of the Village and the White Stockings of East Templeton.

Eighteen seventy-six, the year Jennie McConnell was born, was the hundredth anniversary of the nation’s independence. In Gardner, the centennial celebration started with a bang—a hundred-gun salute followed by a parade starting in South Gardner and ending in the north end of town at Crystal Lake Grove. Many Gardnerites picnicked there and rode on a steamboat called The Little Favorite.

In Washington, DC at the time of the nation’s centennial, the head of the U.S. Patent Office was quoted as saying, It might be a good idea to resign because there didn’t seem to be anything much left to invent. He made that statement in the days of kerosene lamps, wood-burning stoves, and outhouses. By the turn of the century, there were many newfangled contraptions such as the bicycle, automobile, airplane, and phonograph.

Incorporation Day was held in 1885 to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the founding of Gardner. Governor Robinson and other prominent people came from Boston by train. It must have been an exciting time for nine-year-old Jennie and her younger brothers, Roy and Louis. The town went all out with a parade that was a mile long and consisted of 1,200 men. From South Gardner, they marched to Monument Park at the junction of Park and Central Streets, where a new statue was dedicated to Gardner’s brave sons who fought for the Union in the War of the Rebellion 1861-1865. Next, the procession continued up Central Street to Windsor House Square to be reviewed from the hotel by the governor. The ceremonies were brought to a close that evening with a band concert and a grand illumination that included nearly a thousand Chinese lanterns and numerous fireworks.

When my grandmother was only twelve years old, her father died suddenly of cerebral apoplexy, which was the medical condition later called a stroke. He left his wife Rebecca, daughter Jennie, two younger sons Roy and Louis, and a nine-month-old baby girl, Jessie. During that time, many women and children worked at home where they wove cane for chair seats. I remember how surprised I was as a child to discover that my grandmother could cane a chair. I’m sure that after the death of her father, that type of work helped put food on the table.

A young man from Digby, Nova Scotia, came across the border in 1888 to join several of his family who had preceded him to find work in the booming town of Gardner. The young man was my grandfather, James Almon Timpany. He was following in the footsteps of his great-great-grandfather who came to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from Newtonards, County Down, Northern Ireland. Robert Timpany joined the Loyalist cause in the American Revolution, became a Major, and at the peace was given a land grant in Canada by the king. My grandfather, James Timpany, found work at L. B. Ramsdell’s toy factory and boarded on Travers Street in South Gardner. He joined his brother Charles as a firefighter, manning the Cataract engine out of the South Gardner Fire Station. His sister Mary, who married John Hines, and his sister Edith, who was Mrs. Lester Newcomb, also lived in South Gardner. Their younger brother Edgell, who also came from Nova Scotia to work in the wood shops, joined the U.S. Marines. He was killed in the explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898. This event propelled the United States into the Spanish-American War. Edith Timpany, who was Edgell’s niece and my mother’s sister, saw his name engraved on the mast of the USS Maine at Arlington National Cemetery. When I visited Rossway, Nova Scotia, I saw a large plaque erected in Edgell’s honor in the Episcopal Church.

James Timpany 1864-1942

When Jennie McConnell was seventeen, she married James Timpany. An article in The Gardner News of October 7, 1893, described the wedding as follows:

Timpany—McConnell

The home of Mrs. Rebecca McConnell, Mechanic Street, was the scene ot a very pretty wedding, on Thursday night, when her daughter, Miss Jennie McConnell, was married to James Timpany, by the Rev. F. L. Palmer of St. Paul’s church. Promptly at eight o’clock, the bridal party entered tlie room, the bride and groom being preceded by the best man and bridesmaid, Luke H. Howard of Taunton, and Miss Bernice M. Buss. The minister wore the usual vestments, the service being, of course, the beautiful Episcopal service with a ring.The bride was dressed in sapphire silk, trimmed with cream Chantilly lace, and carried a bunch of blush roses. She was given away by her mother. Several guests came from out of town, but only immediate relatives and friends were present. After the ceremony, congratulations were given and received and refreshments were served. Mr. and Mrs. Timpany will make their home with the bride’s mother, 47 Mechanic Street.

The list of presents comprised a great variety of useful and beautiful articles, a list of them, with the names of the donors being as follows:

Lamp,Melissa Meekins; steel engraving, Bernice M. Buss; water set, Roy and Louis McConnell; salt shakes, Jessie E. McConnell; pickle jar, M. Maud McConnell; mantle clock. H. Hines and Edgell Timpany; pair towels, Mrs. J. W. Buss; table cloth, Mr. and Mrs. J. O. Patterson, Barre; salt and pepper shakes, Mrs. Lina Bishop; bon-bon dish, Fred H. Leland; upholstered oak rocker and rug, Mrs. F. M. Jillson and Mr. and Mrs. Louis K. Jillson; berry spoon, J. Fred Lamb; silver tooth-pick dish, Mary A. Lamb; pie knife, G. S. Hutchinson; butter knife, C. F. Brown; half dozen silver teaspoons, Mr. and Mrs. Lester A. Newcomb; berry spoon, Harry M. Jillson; coffee pot, Harriet Tupper, Cambridgeport; butter knife and sugar spoon, Mr. and Mrs. C. B. Ogilvie; glass fruit dish, Mrs. Rebecca McConnell; half dozen dinner knives, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew McConnell; half dozen fruit knives, Addison M. Stone; fan, Eunice Tupper, Boston; silk tie, Kate Lawrence, Denver, Col.;