Ancestral Bridges

c. 1900

Mother of long time Amherst resident, Dudley Bridges, who married Doris Roberts, daughter of Gil & Ida (Bateman) Roberts. Leilah's love of millinery and fashion of the time nods to Amherst resident and entrepreneur Henry Jackson.

Amherst’s thriving straw hat business owed much to Jackson, who supplied raw materials and delivered bank deposits before railroads and banks came to Amherst.

Henry Jackson was born in North Amherst in 1818, and attended school in East Amherst  while laboring stagecoach stables during much of the year. He eventually opened his own business, advertising himself as a truckman, a hauler of what needs to be hauled. He married twice, had one son, and lived on Railroad Street. Throughout the 19th century, Henry Jackson was an important figure. Before the railroad came to town in the 1850s, Jackson trucked goods up and down the Valley for farmers and businesses. The palm leaf hat business which began to thrive in Amherst owed a great deal to Jackson who would pick up raw material in Palmer at the railroad station and bring them back to Amherst. He would then take the finished product back to his or other depots for shipment throughout the US. He also provided an invaluable service to local businesses who needed to make bank deposits in Northampton or Greenfield, as Amherst didn’t have its own bank until 1860. 

Jackson, along with William Jennings and Lewis Frazier learned that the Shaw family of Belchertown was going to sell a young girl, Angeline Palmer, into bondage in the South. The Amherst Selectmen were still legal guardians. Angeline Palmer's half-brother was 20 year-old Lewis Frazier, and he and his friends Henry Jackson, 23, and William Jennings, 27, appealed to the Amherst Selectmen to take action. The Selectmen refused to get involved, leaving few options available. After a confusing journey by coach to Belchertown, the 3 men finally found Angeline back at the Shaw home. Frazier entered the Park Street home in search of his sister, while Jackson and Jennings waited in the wagon. A commotion erupted in the house, where Mrs. Shaw and a neighbor had Frazier- with Angeline in his arms- trapped in an upstairs room. Responding to their friends' calls for assistance, Jackson and Jennings forced their way into the house and up the stairs. They pushed Mrs. Shaw aside and opened the door and the 3 men led Angeline down the stairs, past a crowd that was assembling, and into the buggy and brought her to Colrain to stay with the family of Charles Green, a free Black man.