Agawam, Massachusetts
A Short History of Agawam
Agawam spent two hundred and twenty years as part of somebody else. That is the fact that explains the rest.
First in the Valley
The first house built by European settlers in all of western Massachusetts went up in the Agawam Meadows in 1635, raised by John Cable and John Woodcock. The land already had a name and a people: in 1636 William Pynchon bought a large tract from the Agawam people, and in 1640 the plantation took the name Springfield, after Pynchon’s English hometown. So the site of the region’s oldest European settlement began its recorded life as the edge of someone else’s town, and it would stay an edge for a very long time.
Two Hundred Years as an Outskirt
Folded first into Springfield and later split off as part of West Springfield, Agawam spent those centuries as somebody else’s outskirt. Then, on May 17, 1855, it separated from West Springfield and was incorporated as its own town, two hundred and twenty years after Cable and Woodcock raised that first roof. The name on the incorporation papers was the name the place had carried all along: Agawam, from the people who lived on this land first.
The Town That Runs Like a City
More than a century later, Agawam changed how it governs itself without changing what it is called. Effective January 1, 1973, the community adopted a mayor and city council form of government while keeping the words “Town of” in its legal name. That is why, today, the Town of Agawam elects a Mayor and an eleven member City Council, every seat chosen citywide. The paperwork says town. The machinery says city. Both are true, and the ballot is where you see it.
Riverside Park and the Racetrack
Agawam’s most famous address grew from a riverside picnic grove. The grove became Riverside Park, an amusement ground, and Riverside Park grew into Six Flags New England. For half a century the grounds also held something faster: a NASCAR sanctioned auto racing track that ran from 1948 to 2000. Generations of New Englanders have screamed their way down a coaster, or watched a stock car take a corner, on Agawam soil.
The Green Edges
Two rivers frame the town, the Connecticut on one side and the Westfield along another, and some of the best of what lies between is protected. Robinson State Park, an 852 acre reservation stretching along the Westfield River, is one of the largest pieces of conservation land in Agawam. In Feeding Hills, the town’s western village, Provin Mountain rises over the neighborhoods. Feeding Hills borders Southwick, Westfield, and Suffield, Connecticut, and has kept its own identity down to its own ZIP code, 01030.
Sources: Agawam Historical Association (agawamhistory.org); Wikipedia; Town of Agawam.