Blandford, Massachusetts
A Short History of Blandford
A hill settlement the Scots-Irish called Glasgow, renamed by a governor after the ship that carried him across the ocean, on the old Boston-to-Albany road.
Glasgow on the Hill
Blandford was first settled in 1735 by Scots-Irish families who had come west from Hopkinton, thirty miles out of Boston, looking for a place to practice their Presbyterian faith freely. In keeping with their heritage they named the new settlement Glasgow, and they laid it out in the traditional New England pattern, house lots clustered at the center with larger farm lots around them. By 1740 the town center held its first meeting house, begun that year as a Scots-Irish Presbyterian church, along with a schoolhouse and several taverns.
A Governor, and a New Name
When the settlers applied for incorporation in 1741, Governor William Shirley noticed they had surveyed an extra square mile into the township, more than the six-mile square they had been granted. He refused their chosen name of Glasgow and named the town Blandford instead, after the ship that had brought him from England to America. The town was officially incorporated on November 10, 1741. Its location on the Road to Tunnock, later known as the General Knox Trail, put it on the main route between Boston and Albany, and the many taverns of the town prospered on the weary travelers who passed through.
Farms, a Fair, and a Ski Hill
The soil was poor and the grain crop limited, so Blandford’s farmers leaned on hay and on raising livestock, and the town’s agricultural life still shows in the Blandford Fair, held every Labor Day weekend at the fairgrounds south of the center, with old-fashioned exhibits, competitions, and a midway. In 1936 the Springfield Ski Club opened the Blandford Ski Area on one of the town’s hills, and for decades it was the oldest continuously operating club-owned ski area in North America before it closed in 2020.
The Library the Town Voted For
Blandford’s most consequential recent decision was made the way the town has always made them, at Town Meeting. For five years the town set aside twenty five thousand dollars a year toward a new home for its Porter Memorial Library, and at a Special Town Meeting in March 2024 residents voted that whole savings as the town’s local match. In December 2025 the state answered with a 5.4 million dollar construction grant. A town of about twelve hundred people had put up its own money first, and that is what unlocked the rest.
Sources: Town of Blandford, “Town History” (townofblandford.gov); Wikipedia, “Blandford, Massachusetts”; Town of Blandford, Porter Memorial Library Expansion Project (townofblandford.gov).