Franklin County Fairgrounds considers housing historic stagecoach

GREENFIELD — The Franklin County Agricultural Society is considering building a pavilion to house the city’s 19th-century stagecoach after Historical Commission member Sarah Bolduc learned of its ties to the Franklin County Fairgrounds.

The commission has intentions to restore the 1867 Abbot-Downing Co. stagecoach, which the city has owned for roughly a century and has been stored at the Department of Public Works for the last decade. However, before the commission can undertake that project, Bolduc said the antique first needs a suitable place to be stored.

Archived editions of the Greenfield Recorder depict the stagecoach as having been believed to have been initially owned by a man in Brattleboro, Vermont. Described by Bolduc as a “high-end” vehicle akin to the Cadillac of its time, the stagecoach was used in local parades and festivals as recently as 1988, newspaper archives note.

The city’s acquisition of the Brattleboro stagecoach — until very recently — was shrouded in mystery. Bolduc, a self-proclaimed “history nerd” who spent hours reviewing antique photographs, explained that it was, most likely, transferred between Brattleboro and Greenfield’s agricultural fairs — the Valley Fair and Franklin County Fair, respectively.

Bolduc explained that an agreement to share the stagecoach between the two fairs was likely made through “handshake agreements” at coaching clubs and elite social circles between prominent families, such as the Pierces and Riddells, of Greenfield, and the Taylors, of Brattleboro, leaving behind no receipts or paper trails.

“I have it on good authority that it was actually bought and kept as a parade piece and used in these kinds of fairs, because there are repeated references to the ‘old city coach,’ the old Brattleboro coach, and it went back and forth between the Greenfield (Franklin County) Fair and to the Valley Fair in Brattleboro,” Bolduc said. “Interestingly enough, as those older families fell out of local prominence, older members passed away, people moved away, the stagecoach ended up in Greenfield and was kind of forgotten about.”

Bolduc said she was able to make the link between the two towns’ uses of the stagecoach by analyzing newspaper archives and old photos from the two fairs. One in particular was published in the Recorder in 1897 depicting a group of women riding the stagecoach at the Franklin County Fair, which was decorated in white and captioned “Tally-Ho!”

“It’s covered in what looks like white crepe paper, and it says, ‘Tally Ho.’ They actually made a coach called a Tally Ho and it was a Concord-style coach. Interestingly enough, a ‘Tally Ho’ is a different model of coach,” Bolduc said. “The reason that nobody was able to piece together this progeny story all this time is because in that photograph, people assumed it was a tally wholesale coach, or that was the name of that float, but that is our Concord coach covered in crepe paper or some kind of decorative paper used for parades.”

Unveiling the historical link between the Franklin County Fairgrounds and the stagecoach prompted Franklin County Agricultural Society President Michael Nelson to begin searching for ways to house it at the Wisdom Way fairgrounds.

Nelson said the fairgrounds’ existing large buildings do not have room to accommodate the historic vehicle in a way that protects it from damage, given the volume of programming in the area. He said the Agricultural Society could either build a new pavilion in which to house the stagecoach or repair one of its small, but run-down, buildings.

“We’ve learned a lot, particularly from the research that Sarah Bolduc and the Historical Commission have done about the background of the stagecoach and the important role that it had with the fairgrounds many years ago,” Nelson said. “It does naturally seem like a perfect fit for the stagecoach to return to the fairgrounds.”

As the small structure would be costly to repair and is located in an area that lacks the “prominence” he believes the artifact deserves, Nelson said he hopes to instead pursue the construction of a new pavilion, which could display and house the stagecoach and be used as a dining area or performance center.

Noting that plans to house the coach are too preliminary for the Agricultural Society’s board of directors to have developed specific funding proposals, Nelson envisions that, should the matter gain the board’s support, the society may be able to secure grants.

Both Nelson and Bolduc expressed excitement for the stagecoach’s new display, with Bolduc explaining that she hopes the artifact will be seen as a piece of Greenfield’s history that residents can unite over.

“This artifact belongs to Greenfield. What we’re going to do with this is really give this stagecoach back to the public and say, ‘Hey, you’re part of this story. Let’s lay out the rest of the story. Come and talk to us about your neighbors. Let’s meet each other, let’s become a community again,’ in a way that the internet and the modern world has really kind of disallowed,” Bolduc said. “As much as the internet has brought us all together, it’s certainly aided in dividing us on the fact that we have this physical piece of our history ties us back to our roots. We don’t exist in a vacuum — 2026 is not a vacuum. This is something that we can offer to the entire town to say ‘Here, this is our story.'”