Turley Publications photos by Ruth M. Lyon

Warren Elementary School Principal Tedd Brown adjusts the music for the Maypole dance.

Elementary school students began the day’s activities with a maypole dance on Warren’s common.

Warren Elementary School teachers Kristi Kenyon and Debby Ryzewski taught the children to perform the maypole dance.

Warren celebrates May Day

By Ruth M. Lyon

Turley Publications Reporter

WARREN - May Day’s activities began at 9:30 a.m., with students of Warren Elementary School performing a May pole dance on the town common. A small group of parents, grandparents and friends watched as eight fifth-graders danced colorful ribbons around the pole, observing an ancient tradition.

As they gathered, elementary school principal Tedd Brown kept an eye on proceedings, joined by teachers Kristi Kenyon and Debby Ryzewski, who had instructed the children in the performance as a physical education exercise.

Participating in the dance were Thomas Phillips, Nathan Russo, Megan Duncan, Rachael Westberg, Sarah Westberg, Maria Matys, Rebecca Bourgette and Allanna Ray.

At a nearby picnic table, Beverly Sawyer and Joyce Eichacher busily filled colorful, ribbon bedecked May baskets with candies. They would later be handed to every person who entered the bus for local librarian and historian Sylvia Buck’s tour of this town’s historic sites.

John Dyjak, Quaboag 350^th Chairman for Warren, busily encouraged the dancers, snagged a lollypop, and chatted up the crowd.

In a tour of about two hours, Buck enlightened participants in a relaxed, chatty manner as the bus traveled the back roads and byways of historic Warren.

According to Buck, Warren, then named Western, was set off from Quaboag Plantation in 1741 because residents complained that it was too far to travel to attend religious services at West Brookfield’s congregational church. Subsequently, a piece of land was purchased on Comey’s Hill (the upper end of Southbridge St.) for the site of a meeting house; there, the First Congregational Church was built. As the Quaboag River became an important source of water power for manufacturing purposes, the valley became the town’s center. A new Congregational church was built on the common in the 1790s, and later moved to the Winthrop Terrace site. That church was destroyed by a gas explosion; the present church was erected there in 1875. For many years as the Federated Church, is now the Emmanuel Church.

As this discussion of the importance of “getting to meeting” was related, the bus moved among the five villages that made up the town’s early beginnings. The two principle villages are now Warren and West Warren, but Lower Village, #4 Village, and South Warren retain distinctive features revealing vestiges of the town’s early beginnings.

Buck, noting the Franklin mile markers along the way, said the first toll road in the state of Massachusetts, the Boston Post Road, began in Warren. The town’s history also includes an ink factory, edged tools factory, woolen and cotton mills. She took obvious enjoyment in sharing her trove of local minutiae as well as substantive facts concerning the town among the hills. And hills there are; the bus bumped its way to the top of Coy Hill, 1,160 feet high, and the bottom of Mark’s Mountain. Fellow travelers learned of the flourishing cheese factories that supplied Boston with its wheels of tasty preserved protein, the cotton mills, the famous Whipple scythes, George Washington’s lunchtime visit to his aide to camp, Mr. Green, on Reed St. Sail boats graced Comin’s Pond, and ice was harvested there until the 1950s. There was a powder mill (gunpowder) and taverns galore to serve the stagecoaches passing through between Springfield and Boston. The powder mill spurred an interest in establishing an armory there, but Springfield’s location was eventually deemed more accessible to transportation, thus won the coveted facility.

Then, there were the grisly details of a local axe murder, and the strange tale of buried treasure. There was the story of the patriot’s wife who, against her revolutionary principles, served her minister some carefully hoarded tea when he came to call, for propriety’s sake. “But in very tiny cups.”

There was history aplenty, served up with humor and a light, gossipy touch. (Buck says this may be the first of an annual such tour.) And at the end, an informal lunch at the Emmanuel church.

Warren is one of the six towns participating in this year’s Quaboag 350^th celebration, in recognition of the original settlement of the area, then called Pynchon’s Plantation or Quaboag.

The area that is now Warren was once the hunting and fishing grounds of the Nipmuck Indians. The original territory included the land east of the Quaboag River and North of Naultaug Brook to Asquoash (Bare-Knoll Range) to the junction of the Quaboag River and the outlet of Lake Wickaboag. A larger portion was taken from the Brookfield tract when the town was incorporated, including portions of South Warren (Brimfield) and Kingsfield (Palmer).

In 1834, to avoid confusion and the misdirection of mail due to similarity of the names of the towns of Weston and Western, the town was renamed Warren; that name was chosen in memory of General Joseph Warren, who died in the Battle of Bunker Hill.

According to Dyjak, this is the first in a series of Warren events being planned for the Quaboag 350^th celebration. Additionally, Warren residents have been and will be participating in the anniversary events in other towns throughout the year, including the large homecoming weekend in West Brookfield on September 17, 18 and 19.

For further information, visit www.quaboag350.com.