The Cabotville sycamores survived hurricanes, floods, industrialization, and modern urbanization, and they were already growing here in 1848 when Cabotville's citizens petitioned to incorporate as a town, after which the General Court of Massachusetts approved the request on the condition that the new town be named Chicopee. In the 1850s the trees stood less than fifty feet from a busy rail line as a spur of the Connecticut River Railroad ran along the Chicopee River between Chicopee Junction and the textile mills in Chicopee Falls. After the Mexican War, the Ames Sword Company established a bronze foundry on this site to produce statues and memorials, and in 1853 Silas Mosman took charge of the operation. The company's first commission was a statue of Benjamin Franklin for the lawn of Boston City Hall, and employees received rail passes to attend its dedication in Boston on September 17, 1856. By the 1870s the Ames Works was producing Civil War memorials for communities on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, and when its Chicopee River forge cast the bronze doors for the east and west wings of the capitol building, two special flat bed rail cars carried them to Washington, D.C. Beneath these trees, the Boston and Maine Railroad later built a new station, and in the 1880s, while Chicopee's George Dexter Robinson was governor of Massachusetts, special trains were sent there and the building became known as Robinson Station. The sycamores were mature by 1890, when Chicopee became a city, and in 1999 the nearly 200-year-old trees were designated Heritage Trees by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' Heritage Tree Care Program.