The Holyoke Water-Power Company.
In the year 1857 the Hadley Falls Company failed, and the property, consisting of abut 1100 acres of land, the reservoir, gas-works, and the Hadley Falls machine-shops, now known as the Hadley Thread Company, was purchased by the late Alfred Smith of Hartford, Conn., for the sum of $325,000, and the Holyoke Water-Power Company was incorporated in June 1859, with a capital of $350,000. George M. Bartholomew, of Hartford, Conn., is president, and William A. Chase is agent and treasurer. This water-power has its own unit of measurement called a "mill-power," and is described as follows in the deeds of the water-power company:
"Each mill-power at the respective falls is declared to be the right, during sixteen hours in a day, to draw from the nearest canal or water-course of the grantors, and through the land to be granted, thirty-eight cubic feet of water per second at the upper call, when the head and fall there is twenty feet, or a quantity inversely proportionate to the height of the other falls."
In the language of Judge Buckland, "one of these mill-powers is equivalent in round numbers to sixty-five horse-powers, and when a site for a mill or shop is taken, the requisite number of mill-powers is conveyed to the occupant by an indenture of perpetual lease, the form of which is never varied. The last purchaser takes the same rights in kind as those who have preceded him or those who will come after, until the sales shall have reached that safe limit of available power which has been resolved upon. having entered upon such an indenture, the mill-owner, relieved of all anxiety or expense of maintaining the dam and canals, confident of the permanence and safety of the great hydraulic system, and secure in the guarantees of the corporation which controls it, pays his semi-annual rental, finds the canal always full at his head-gate, and makes his plans and contracts with the assurance that his due allowance of motive-power will be always forthcoming,—a motive-power which is furnished at a rate so cheap as to be almost nominal when compared with the prevailing rates of rental in other parts of the country, or with steam-power, or with the cost of water-power derived from streams of the average size.
"If the cost of the dam and canals at Holyoke was large, the number of mill-powers obtained was still larger proportionally, thus reducing the cost of a single one far below the average outlay required to obtain the same amount of power by a dam and canal on a smaller stream; and the same principle applies to the expense of maintenance. The annual rental per mill-power is 260 ounces of silver of the standard fineness of the coinage of 1859, which is in practice paid in current funds, and amounts to about $300 per year or $4.62 per horse-power, an expense so small as to be hardly an appreciable item in the cost of any manufacture. The prices charged for water-power vary so widely in different sections of the country, and the comparative value of such power depends so much on locality, accessibility, and other natural conditions, that no stated comparison is here attempted between the annual rental above given and the ruling rates elsewhere; but if the reader takes the trouble to institute such a comparison, it will not only be found that the cost of water-power here is far less than the average rental throughout the country, whether paid as water-rent, or in the form of interest and maintenance, but also that to-day, all things considered, Holyoke affords the cheapest and most desirable manufacturing power in the world."
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