By John Albee
Over the Green Store is a hall where formerly Adin Ballou used to preach his various gospels of Universalism, temperance, peace and abolition on Sunday afternoons following the morning services in his neighboring parish, the Hopedale Community. As my family was attached to the Baptist and Methodist persuasion I cannot now imagine what drew them to hear this famous reformer of society and religion. They must have attended in this hall, for though I cannot recall anything else. I do remember going to sleep there in the hot summer afternoon in my sister's lap. But any kind of a meeting was a temptation not to be resisted in that little community. Adin Ballou was in full sympathy with all the other reformers and transcendentalists of the Commonwealth and when I search myself for an explanation of my early and intuitive attraction to their ideals I sometimes fancy they must have visited me in my sleep in that old hall, or perhaps I heard something which lay like a seed in the unconscious, secret recesses of my being until time and circumstances called it forth. For I find it recorded that he fired his hearers with aspirations for "grand objects and noble ideas."
The paragraph above was copied for us (Elaine and Dan Malloy) by Myla Thayer when we were working on our book on Hopedale during the spring of 2002. Elaine inquired about a source of information on the Green Store and was told that we should contact Myla who had been a member of the Community Bible Chapel for many years. When we first visited her, a carpenter was making repairs to damage done by a car that had crashed into her house in the middle of the night, several months earlier. Myla, well into her 90s, seemed to have taken the accident in stride and was evidently sleeping well, not worrying about a possible repeat of the accident. She provided us with all the information we needed and even copied the lines above from John Albee's Confessions of Boyhood. We used some of Albee's recollections in a caption under a picture of the Green Store in the book. DM
History of South Hopedale Milford News Green Store article HOME