Buckland, Massachusetts
A Short History of Buckland
From a hill-country grant once called No Town, to the birthplace of the woman who founded Mount Holyoke College, to a garden blooming on top of a water main over the Deerfield River.
From No Town to Buckland
English families began settling this stretch of the hills west of the Deerfield River in 1742, on land that for years carried the plain working name No Town. The town was formally incorporated on April 14, 1779, in the middle of the Revolution, and took the name Buckland, generally traced to the abundant hunting in its woods. It has been a small, rural town ever since, governed the way it still is today: by the neighbors who show up to Town Meeting.
Mary Lyon
Buckland’s most far-reaching figure was born and raised here. Mary Lyon grew up on a Buckland farm, taught in local schools, and ran a school of her own in town before she founded Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley in 1837, the institution now known as Mount Holyoke College. She built it to give women an education as serious as any men’s college offered, and it became a model for women’s higher education across the country. Mary Lyon Hill in Buckland still carries her name, a reminder that a nationally important idea started with a teacher from a hill town of a few hundred families.
Shelburne Falls and the Bridge of Flowers
Buckland and the neighboring Town of Shelburne share a single downtown, the village of Shelburne Falls, split between them by the Deerfield River. In 1908 a trolley company built a bridge across the river there, and when the trolley line went bankrupt the span survived because it also carried the water main between the two towns. In 1929 the local fire district bought the bridge for $1,250, and the Shelburne Falls Area Women’s Club planted it as a garden rather than let it sit idle. The Bridge of Flowers has been tended by volunteers ever since, and after a long closure it was replanted and reopened in July 2025.
The Mohawk Trail and the River
The Mohawk Trail, today Massachusetts Route 2, crosses the northeastern corner of Buckland; it is one of the region’s old scenic touring roads, and it still brings visitors through the hills each fall. The Deerfield River that forms the town’s northern and eastern edge did more than mark a border: its falls at Shelburne Falls powered the mills and the cutlery works that gave the village its industry, while the hills behind them stayed in farms and woodlots.
A Hill Town’s Long Arc
Buckland’s population peaked at 1,946 residents in 1870, in the mill-and-farm decades of the nineteenth century, and it has stayed close to that size ever since, standing at 1,816 in the 2020 census. That steadiness is part of what makes the town’s civic life work the way it does: small enough that Town Meeting really is the legislature, and that a volunteer on a single board can shape a real decision.
Sources: Wikipedia, Buckland, Massachusetts; Wikipedia, Mary Lyon; the Bridge of Flowers (bridgeofflowersmass.org); U.S. Census Bureau.