Bernardston, Massachusetts
A Short History of Bernardston
From a fortified frontier grant made to the veterans of a 1676 battle, to a Franklin County farming town named for a royal governor, to a corner of the Pioneer Valley a few miles from the Vermont line.
Falls Fight Township
English settlement here began in 1738, when the colony laid out a township for the families of soldiers who had fought in the 1676 Falls Fight at nearby Turners Falls during King Philip’s War. The place was known for years simply as Falls Fight Township. It sat on the northern frontier of the colony, and the earliest houses were built of hewn logs with portholes cut in the walls for defense. This was contested ground: an attack on one settler’s stockade in 1746 was turned back, and the frontier stayed dangerous into the 1740s.
Incorporated in 1762
Bernardston was incorporated as a town in 1762 and took its name from Sir Francis Bernard, who was then the royal governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. That is the ordinary way a Massachusetts town was born in the colonial period: a settled district petitioned the General Court, and an act of incorporation gave it the right to hold its own town meeting, tax itself, and send a representative. The open town meeting that still votes Bernardston’s budget is a direct line back to that founding.
The Town That Set Off Leyden
Early Bernardston was larger than the town you live in now. In 1784 its western section was set off as the District of Leyden, which was formally incorporated as its own town in 1809. Bernardston and Leyden are neighbors again today in a way their founders would recognize: both are member towns of the Pioneer Valley Regional School District, so the children of the town that split off and the town it split from share the same schools and the same regional budget.
A Farming Town
For most of its history Bernardston was a farming community, raising rye, corn, cider, and maple sugar in the hills of Franklin County. One story captures the scale of it: the town once sent the largest animal ever to reach the New York meat markets, a 2,473-pound ox nicknamed Constitution. The land still shapes the town. The Fall River, a tributary of the Connecticut, runs through the center, and Wildcat, West, Bald, East and Pond Mountains rise around a valley that Interstate 91, U.S. Route 5, and Route 10 now cross on their way north toward Vermont.
Sources: Wikipedia, Bernardston, Massachusetts (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardston,_Massachusetts); U.S. Census Bureau.