In 1662 the people living on the west side of the Connecticut River petitioned town meeting to build a fence between the “Great River” and the Agawam River, where the Park Avenue sidewalk is today. The region enclosed by the two rivers and the fence was called “The Great and General Field” and, when no crops were growing there, animals were allowed to roam freely.
After the fence had been built, it was found that there was an 8-acre parcel of land south of the fence that remained ungranted. In 1663 this property, which ran from the “Great River” to what is now Union Street, was given to Peter and Mariah Swinck, black servants of John Pynchon. Although the Pynchons were using slave labor in the 1650’s, local records are very careful to point out that the Swincks were NOT slaves but, rather, free people. This fact is corroborated in that the Swincks were given several land grants on the “West Side of the Great River” and that they owned these lands “in their own right” just like all the other Puritan settlers.
Swinck’s grant had the following very specific restriction. The land “is granted on condition that he live (there) till his time be expired and that he settle his abode there, that is, on the said lot”. From this and some subsequent land transactions we know that Peter and Mariah Swinck’s house was located where the Ground Round Restaurant is today. Peter Swinck died in 1699 and his widow, Mariah, died in 1708 at which time the house and homelot became the property of Jonathan Ball.
It is possible that this grant to Peter Swinck was one of the earliest land grants to a non-white settler in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay.
The site was residential property until the second quarter of the 20th century when a Howard Johnson’s Restaurant was built there. The Ground Round Restaurant, presently on the site, is still owned by Howard Johnson’s.
On the west corner of Main Street at Park Avenue, across from the Ground Round, was the home of Sarah Isabelle Cooley, affectionately known as “Belle”. She was a graduate of Mt. Holyoke College and a local teacher. Belle was active in the women’s suffrage movement and when the law was passed giving women the right to vote, she rang the Town Hall bell in celebration.