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 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.]