From one Holyoke to another, Massachusetts visitor tours the town

When Joe Maspo of Holyoke, Massachusetts, found out he’d be attending a conference at Colorado State University in Fort Collins the week of June 5, he was thrilled to seize the opportunity to achieve his goal to visit the Holyoke, Colorado, town before heading back home. In the coming years, he intends to visit other towns and cities named Holyoke, both in and outside the United States. He’s already visited a Holyoke in France. 

Maspo earned a master’s degree in history from the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. He has a particular passion for local history that stems from having grown up in the first fully planned industrial city in America. He’s also worked on a variety of local history projects with his city’s museum and archive. 

He was aware that Holyoke was not named after the city of Holyoke, Massachusetts, but rather a member of a family named Holyoke whose ancestry includes the early settlers in Massachusetts. A record of that fact is recorded in the “Those Were the Days…” centennial history of Phillips County, copyrighted by the Phillips County Historical Society in 1988. Page 61 of that publication includes the statement, “Holyoke was named after a man by that name and said to have been from Holyoke, Mass. It seems that Holyoke became a Town from a humble beginning surrounding the building of a railroad and the General Manager of the Burlington and Missouri Railroad had a favored son-in-law by the name of E. A. Holyoke.” 

Before heading back to Denver to turn in his rental car, Maspo was headed to Amherst “to walk every street since it’s such a small town.” He currently works for the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, so he wanted to visit the Colorado Amherst, too. Then he was going to make a quick stop in Venango for the purpose of getting to step foot in the state of Nebraska that he’d never been to before. 

This was Maspo’s first visit to the country’s “high plains” region. He especially noticed the numerous grain elevators, expanse of open land between developed areas, and lack of trees compared to the eastern United States. 

He was very favorably impressed with Holyoke and said the trip was well worth it.