The town hall in Glover, Massachusetts, on the evening of March 17, 1947, was overheated. The wood stove at the back had been stoked since four o'clock, and by seven the windows were running with condensation. The town clerk, Mildred Howe, recorded an attendance of 153 registered voters, out of a total registered population of 211.
The first warrant article concerned the repair of the bridge over Cold Brook. It passed without debate. The second concerned the salary of the road agent. It passed after some discussion of the price of gravel.
The third article was the one that brought the town out.
It had been added to the warrant by petition, with twenty-three signatures, ten days earlier. The petitioner was a dairy farmer named Howard Atwell, age fifty-one, who had returned the previous autumn from four years with the Army Quartermaster Corps in Europe and the Pacific. The article read, in full, To see if the Town will vote to withdraw from the United States of America and constitute itself an independent municipal entity, and to take any other action thereon.
The discussion lasted, according to Howe's minutes, two hours and forty minutes.
The minutes of Glover town meetings between 1846 and 1972 are held at the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield. The 1947 volume is bound in green cloth and runs to 184 pages. The minutes for the meeting of March 17 take up sixteen of them, the longest single entry in the book.
Atwell spoke first. His remarks, as transcribed by Howe, ran to about nine hundred words. He spoke about the price of milk, which had fallen seventeen percent since the end of price controls the previous June. He spoke about a federal grain quota that had been imposed on the town's three largest dairy operations. He spoke about an excise tax on farm trucks that had taken effect in January.
He spoke, also, about his son.
Atwell's son, Howard Junior, had been killed at Okinawa in May 1945. He was nineteen years old. The town's war memorial, dedicated in 1946, lists his name fourth among the seven Glover men who died in the war.
Atwell did not argue that his son's death was the federal government's fault. He argued, according to Howe's minutes, that he had given what he had to give, and now they would not even let him sell his milk at a fair price.
“Atwell did not argue that his son's death was the federal government's fault.”
Other voters spoke. The minutes record forty-two separate speakers. Most opposed the article. A retired schoolteacher named Cora Brennan called it a tantrum, not a town meeting. The selectman, Edwin Foss, called it illegal on its face, which it was.
But others supported it. A young veteran named Paul Krasinski, twenty-six, spoke in favor. A widow named Bertha Mullen, sixty-eight, whose two grandsons had served in the Pacific, spoke in favor. The town's only Black resident, a logger named Samuel Ross, abstained from speaking but voted yes in the eventual ballot.
The vote was taken by paper ballot at 9:47 p.m. The result was 89 in favor, 64 opposed. The article passed.
What happened next is the part of the story that has been most often misremembered.
The town did not, in any meaningful sense, secede. There was no flag-lowering, no declaration sent to Washington, no border posted on Route 8. The next morning was a Tuesday and the dairy trucks ran on schedule and the children went to school.
But the vote had taken place, and the minutes had been entered, and word had reached the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield by Wednesday afternoon. A reporter named Daniel Fitzpatrick drove out to Glover on Thursday and filed a six-hundred-word story that ran on the front page on Friday, March 21, under the headline Town Votes Itself Out of Union, Then Goes to Work.
The story was picked up by the Associated Press over the weekend. By Monday it had appeared in newspapers in fourteen states. The town received its first telegram from a Washington office, the office of Representative John W. Heselton of the First Massachusetts District, on Tuesday morning.
Heselton arrived in Glover on Thursday, March 27. The historian Jane Sullivan, in her 1998 study of postwar New England town politics, called his visit a model of the kind of intervention that no longer happens. He spent six hours in the town. He visited Atwell's farm. He sat in the kitchen of the widow Mullen. He drank coffee at the diner across from the town hall.
He did not, as later accounts sometimes claimed, make any speeches. He listened. He took notes in a small leather book that is now held at the Forbes Library in Northampton.
A special town meeting was warned for the evening of March 28. Article one was a motion to rescind the action of March 17. The motion was made by Atwell himself.
It passed unanimously.
The minutes of the special meeting, two pages long, contain no record of what Heselton said in his kitchen meetings, or what Atwell decided overnight, or what the widow Mullen told her grandsons in her letters that week.
Heselton, back in Washington, did not introduce any specific legislation for Glover. He did, however, attach an amendment to the agricultural appropriations bill that summer providing modest relief for small dairy operations affected by quota reductions. The amendment passed with the bill.
Atwell continued to farm in Glover until his death in 1971. He served two terms as selectman in the 1950s. He never again, according to the town records, filed a warrant article.
The story of the 1947 vote was largely forgotten outside Glover within a decade. It surfaced briefly in 1962 in a regional history magazine, and again in 1976 in connection with the Bicentennial, and most recently in Sullivan's 1998 study.
What is striking about the episode, in the long view, is not the vote itself but what came after. A congressman drove out from Washington and sat in a kitchen. A farmer who had lost his son was listened to. The vote was reversed and the milk trucks ran and the bridge over Cold Brook was repaired.
Whether any of this would happen the same way now is a question the archives cannot answer. The minutes are still in their green cloth binding in Pittsfield, and the kitchen where Heselton drank his coffee was torn down in 1983 to widen the road.
