"Technology marches on and the wonders of yesterday become the curiosities of today. But in every great age some men succeed in rising above the transient and in creating works which outlast the times which produce them. The founders of Holyoke were such men. They built with such honesty and intelligence that the city has never been forced to abandon its original foundations. It remains a living monument to those pioneer engineers and industrialists of the mid-nineteenth century who had neither coal nor steel. When, after the Civil War, these two commodities became available, creative imaginations of the type which visioned Holyoke transformed America within a third of a century into the leading industrial nation of the world."