Ashfield, Massachusetts
A Short History of Ashfield
A hill town of fewer than two thousand people has kept turning up at the center of American arguments: the first Shaker meeting house in 1789, the Free Soil party in the 1850s, temperance at town meeting in 1848, and in 2015 a vote to build its own internet.
Huntstown
Ashfield began as a land grant with a name of its own. The territory was granted as Huntstown to the surviving crew of Captain Ephraim Hunt, sixty men who had petitioned for it as compensation for the hardships of the 1690 expedition to Canada during King William’s War. Grants like that were how Massachusetts paid debts it had no money for, and they are the reason a great many western towns exist at all.
Lot Number One
Among the earliest to hold land in the town was a freed Black man named Heber, who purchased rights in the new town and drew lot number one in 1739. Permanent settlement followed in 1745 under Richard Ellis, an Irish immigrant from Easton. Two decades later the town was incorporated and renamed Ashfield, in 1765. Accounts differ on where the name came from: the ash trees of the area, or friends of Governor Bernard in Ashfield, England.
At the Center of the Currents
The town’s own account of itself is worth reading, because it does not claim to be quiet. Ashfield has been at the center of many of the currents of American history since its incorporation, and it names three of them: the pietist movement of the late eighteenth century, when the first Shaker meeting house was built here in 1789; the abolition movement, when the Free Soil party triumphed in Ashfield in the 1850s; and the prohibition movement, when the town eliminated the open bar at town meeting in 1848. That last one is worth sitting with. A town that could vote drink out of its own legislative session understood exactly what a town meeting is for.
The Names That Left
Ashfield is the birthplace of the film director Cecil B. DeMille, and the town still honors him: the Ashfield Film Festival, run by volunteers since 2007, hands out a Baby Cecil trophy every year. It was also home ground for Alvan Clark, the telescope maker and astronomer whose lenses went into some of the great observatories of the nineteenth century, and for William S. Clark, a state senator and the third president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College that grew into UMass Amherst.
The Fiber Vote
In 2015 Ashfield decided something large, and it decided it in a room. In September 2015 a Special Town Meeting voted by better than four to one to borrow $2.3 million and build the town a municipal fiber optic broadband network, because the commercial carriers were never going to run a line this far into the hills. The Ashfield Municipal Light Plant runs it to this day under the Select Board, and a Municipal Light Plant board advises them on it. When you read about a town meeting deciding something large, this is what it looks like.
Sources: Town of Ashfield, Community Groups (ashfield.org); Wikipedia, Ashfield, Massachusetts; Town of Ashfield Municipal Light Plant; U.S. Census Bureau. Accessed 2026.