By Richard Price
Grafton News Editor –
It was a cozy general store — back in the day — where folks stocked up on their essentials.
In an old photograph the proprietors, sporting handlebar mustaches, dark suits and slicked hair are frozen in time next to a coal burning stove. There are sacks of meal or flour on the side, tins of biscuits, and a roll of butcher paper. There is a tin roof above their heads and canned goods, neatly stacked behind the counter, next to an old fashioned cash register that was probably state of the art in this undated gem.
But the store was an odd tenant. Their landlord, whom they shared building space with, was the Second Baptist Church, which once stood in North Grafton, across from Washington Mills. Money was tight so half the basement was deeded for the shopkeeper, a convenient stop that couldn’t sell everything but offered what you needed. Unless you needed a bottle of strong drink.
“Because it was a Baptist Church he could not sell liquor,” said Linda Casey while musing over how the church needed the store tenant in their church so they could make ends meet. “It’s interesting how people managed to do what they needed to do.”
This country store photo is one of 212 laid out over 127 glossy pages in a paperback, “Grafton,” part of the “Images of America” series published by Arcadia Publishing & The History Press, who specialize in local and regional history books. The Grafton edition will be released on May 2. Casey wrote the book with the Grafton Historical Society. She is also their director.
“When you put all this research material … you want to make it more accessible,” said Casey. “You know 90 percent of the people will not research, look in the files and in the computer. So to put all this in a book makes it more accessible.” It took the society members eight years of research, including five years rummaging through 50 to 100 boxes of artifacts and photos, which needed to be sorted and categorized. “Then it became possible to tell a story,” she said. Working with the publisher, Casey said the objective is to create a pictorial history book that is not dense with text but still tells a story from beginning to end.
The range of the photos are between 1845 to 1962 but the story begins in the 17th century and covers a lot of ground between its covers. “Often we look at these historical things with a magnifying glass,” said Casey. “And so we don’t see the whole picture. I wanted to see how we have evolved … The past does influence the character of a community.”
Casey’s book walks the reader through time: from the Hassanamesit settlement to its 250-year history as a farming community before exploring each of Grafton’s three parts of town, chapter by chapter. Inside is an old daguerreotype of the Congregational Church from about 1845. In the North Grafton chapter, readers can get a coffee refill at Leofanti’s Restaurant while listening to the jukebox. Then, in the South Grafton chapter, catch the Wuskanut Mills parade float, pulled by two horses, celebrating the end of World War I in 1918. Then the book devotes a chapter to schools — from a one-room school with an outhouse in the back, to a photo of the high school graduating class of 1908 (all 11 of them) with the boys in dark three piece suits and the girls in floor length white dresses.
The final chapter, Coming Together, is packed with photos of residents working together in times of need. In Grafton’s earlier years, Casey said, it was divided by villages, a series of self-contained worlds where people worked, shopped, and lived together. But those boundaries began to slowly break down thanks to the automobile, unified uppers schools and tragedies that brought people together.
There are several photos of the devastation after a hurricane blew through in 1938, and one of residents in a prayerful mood congregating at the Common on June 6, 1944 while Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.
Copies of the new book will become available at two signing events: Tuesday, May 10 at the Grafton Public Library at 7 p.m. and Saturday, May 14 on the Common during Grafton History Day from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. It can also be pre ordered at GraftonHistoricalSociety.org. Royalties earned will benefit the historical society.
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