George C. Ewing

Personal life Ewing was born in Hudson, New York on a day in March or April 1810 to Noble and Miriam (née Wolcott) Ewing. Having served many mills across the country as customers, Ewing was familiar not only with their operations but with their financiers as well. Although the company left the project soon after land was amassed, the Fairbanks Scale Company was largely responsible for the initial charter and water rights of the Hadley Falls Company. Ewing, having personally known Erastus Fairbanks, was able to convince him and a number of backers from Boston, Hartford, and New York to charter the company tasked with building a new planned industrial city.

Labor disagreements and resignation While Ewing, Fairbanks, and their associates were responsible for the conception of the Hadley Falls Company, their direct involvement in Holyoke's founding was cut short when Ewing severed ties as a company agent. Even during his time with the enterprise, Ewing had misgivings with his partners, the Boston Associates, including a decision to pay the dam's laborers 75 cents a day rather than the 85 cents they were initially promised; for the time he remained with the project Ewing paid the difference out of his own personal funds. Their decision to leave the business proved sound when a series of poor design and construction decisions by the associates led to the very first dam washing down the Connecticut River within hours of its gates closing.

Political career Throughout his life Ewing had a varied political career of many positions both in Holyoke, and as a figure in Massachusetts politics. In his early political career he remained active in the Whig Party, serving as a delegate in at least one of the party's conventions in Boston. following the Whig Party's dissolution, Ewing became identified with the Prohibition Party.

Among his many various positions in Holyoke civic life, Ewing served as an assessor in 1851, and a justice of the peace in 1855. In 1852 he served as a state representative to the Massachusetts General Court, the only official state office he held. Prior to its incorporation as a city, Ewing served as one of its selectmen from 1869 to 1870. Ultimately the party selected Alonzo Ames Miner, Tufts University's second president to head the ticket instead. Ewing would run unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in the gubernatorial race of 1878, receiving only 2,117 votes or 0.83% of the final count.

Later life and death George Ewing was a Congregationalist, serving as a lay preacher even into his later years for the Second Congregational Church of Holyoke, which he had joined in 1864. In his final years he wrote a history of the city to be published by its YMCA, which he proclaimed to the secretary of that chapter as well as his son, George Ewing Jr., would be his "last work". this Italianate structure was moved to its present site in 1925 during the construction of Our Lady of the Holy Cross Catholic Church. In addition to purchasing land for the company, Ewing purchased a section of land for himself in an area between the Highlands and downtown Holyoke. With a patchwork of parcels owned by others, Ewing's large tract of land extended from west of Linden Street to Northampton Street; as far south as the present location of Forestdale Cemetery, and as far north as Beacon Avenue. Among his developments to that area, Ewing built four Italianate tenements along Dwight Street, connecting it from the Hadley Falls Company's grid to Northampton Street, a major thoroughfare.