Belchertown, Massachusetts
A Short History of Belchertown
A spring by a road, a town named for a Royal Governor who mostly owned it, the finest carriages in Massachusetts, and a hilltop Common that has been an argument, a pasture and a fairground for more than two hundred years.
Cold Spring, and the Road to Boston
Before it had its name, this was a stop. The old Bay Path ran from Boston toward Albany, and travellers coming over the hills would break at a spring on what is now Cold Spring Road. The settlement that grew around it took the spring’s name. Families from Hatfield, Northampton and Hadley moved out here in July 1731, and by 1737 they were petitioning the General Court to say they had twenty families and expected more. The land itself had been traded away in a border argument: in 1713 the tract that became Belchertown, Ware and Pelham was assigned to Connecticut as compensation for towns Massachusetts kept, and Connecticut sold it in 1716 to sixteen buyers. One of them was Jonathan Belcher, who became Royal Governor of Massachusetts from 1730 to 1740.
1761: Belcher’s Town
The town was incorporated as Belcher’s Town on June 30, 1761, named for the man who had owned a great deal of it. The first town meeting was held on September 30 of that year, and among the officials it elected were a deer reeve and a hog reeve, the second of whom was responsible for rounding up loose hogs and keeping them in the town pound. That is worth pausing on. The first thing the residents of a brand new town did with their new self-government was decide, together, in a room, who would deal with the pigs. The form has not changed. Open Town Meeting is still every registered voter, still in one room, still voting on the actual problems.
The Common
The three acres at the centre of town were set aside for the Congregational Church and deeded to Belchertown on April 1, 1791, and for a long time nobody could agree what they were for. The town voted that geese loose on the Common had to be yoked, and hogs yoked and ringed. In 1828 it voted on whether to keep horses and cattle off it altogether. Farmers paid cash for the standing grass there into the 1870s. The militia trained on it from the Revolution to the Civil War. The Farmers and Mechanics Club started an agricultural fair on it in 1855 that the Belchertown Fair Committee still runs, and the bandstand went up in 1879. A piece of ground the town argued about for a century is now the thing every photograph of Belchertown is taken from.
Made in Belchertown
From the early 1800s until after the Civil War this was a carriage town, with more than ten carriage shops working at various times, first on Federal Street and then closer to the centre. In 1845 alone Belchertown turned out 677 wagons and sleighs worth $40,400, along with 76,782 braided palm leaf hats, a thousand rakes and one organ. Josiah Gilbert Holland, who was born in the north of town and went on to edit the Springfield Republican, wrote in his History of Western Massachusetts that Belchertown made more fine carriages than any other town of its size in the state. The best of them carried a label that said Made in Belchertown, and buggies from here were shipped as far as Virginia. The town still calls its newsletter the Carriagetown Chronicle.
Butter, Rails and What Came After
The first railroad, the Amherst and Belchertown, broke ground in 1850 and ran twice a day to Palmer. By the early 1900s more than forty trains a day passed through. Dairy took over from carriages: the Belchertown Creamery opened in November 1889 just up the hill from Parsons Field, horse-drawn teams collected cream from farms in Enfield and Greenwich, and before 1917 as many as twenty trains a day carried the butter out to the cities. Then Enfield and Greenwich went under the Quabbin Reservoir, the creamery closed in 1917, and the railroad’s Belchertown station shut in December 1961. Today Belchertown is largely a commuter town of single family homes, and the Quabbin it borders is one of the largest man made reservoirs in the country.
The State School, and What Is Being Built There Now
The Belchertown State School, for decades the largest employer in town, closed in 1992. The town created an Economic Development and Industrial Corporation to take on the site, now called Carriage Grove, and the work of turning it back into something is still going. On June 1, 2026 the Select Board voted four to nothing to endorse a MassDevelopment grant application to demolish the last four buildings there, and Town Meeting the month before had voted to transfer a nine acre parcel off Turkey Hill Road to the same corporation for commercial development. This is the slowest kind of civic work and it is entirely public: every step of it has been a recorded vote in a room a resident could walk into.
A Town Written in Special Acts
Belchertown has no home rule charter. Its government has been assembled one act of the Legislature at a time, and the town publishes the whole list as Chapter A301 of its own code. Reading it is a fast education in what a town can and cannot do for itself. A 1990 act created the Department of Public Works. A 1993 act consolidated the Treasurer and the Collector into one appointed office. Another 1993 act made the Town Clerk an appointed position, and then Chapter 29 of the Acts of 1999 turned it back into an elected one, which is why you still vote for a Town Clerk here. Chapter 126 of the Acts of 1997 gave Belchertown recall elections. And Chapter 44 of the Acts of 2024, filed by the town’s own state representative and state senator on a vote of the town, replaced the Town Administrator with a Town Manager. Every one of those started as an article on a warrant.
Sources: Town of Belchertown, Town History, written in 1960 by Kenneth A. Dorey and revised in 2005 (belchertown.org/325/Town-History); Town of Belchertown, About Us (belchertown.org/332/About-Us); Town of Belchertown Code, Chapter A301, Special Acts (ecode360.com/9053693); Chapter 44 of the Acts of 2024; Select Board approved minutes, June 1, 2026; Annual Town Meeting vote summary, May 11, 2026.