Alford, Massachusetts
A Short History of Alford
From Mohican homeland, to a hill town incorporated in 1773, to a community that borrowed the money and wired its own roads for fiber when no company would.
Before the Town
The southern Berkshires, Alford included, were home to Indigenous people long before any European settlement, notably the Mohican, who called themselves the Muh-he-con-ne-ok, the People of the Waters That Are Never Still. When the town marked its 250th anniversary it opened its own history by acknowledging them, and that is where an honest account of Alford begins.
Settlement and Incorporation
English settlers reached these hills around 1750, and Alford was incorporated as a town by the Commonwealth in 1773. In 2023 the Select Board formed the 250th Alford Celebration Committee to mark 250 years since that incorporation, choosing the theme Community, Connection and Conservation and running a year of gatherings, from a wildflower walk to a square dance, into 2024. The date the town chose to celebrate is the 1773 incorporation, not the earlier settlement, and the distinction says something about how Alford sees itself: a town is the moment neighbors agree to govern themselves.
The Town That Wired Itself
For most of its history Alford has been small and rural by choice. It has no post office, so mail arrives from neighboring ZIP codes, and it has no stores, no motel, and no gas station. That same smallness is what made its most modern decision necessary. No cable company was ever going to run fiber to a few hundred houses scattered across the hills, so the town made itself a municipal light plant, borrowed the money, and built its own broadband network, AlfordLink. By 2024 the town reported the network serving hundreds of subscribers at better than 99 percent reliability, run on the fees its users pay, with WhipCity Fiber as a partner. A town of a few hundred people voted itself gigabit internet, one Town Meeting article at a time.
A Room Full of Neighbors
Alford still governs the way it always has, through open Town Meeting, where the budget and the bylaws belong to whoever fills the hall. The town’s own library is the Susan Smith Anderson Library, a children’s library, and its property tax rate was just $4.95 per thousand in 2024. What holds it together is not a big staff or a large budget; it is the habit of neighbors showing up, raising their hands, and deciding the year for one another.
Sources: Town of Alford FY2024 Annual Town Report, including the Alford 250th Report and the AlfordLINK Commission Report (townofalford.org); Town of Alford homepage; U.S. Census Bureau.