Charlemont, Massachusetts
A Short History of Charlemont
From a frontier home one settler built in the early 1740s, to the Mohawk Trail that turned a mountain road into a tourist route, to a hill town that in our own century voted to build and own its broadband outright.
From Boston Township Number 1 to Charlemont
This stretch of hills was first surveyed as Boston Township Number 1 in 1736. Moses Rice built a home here in the early 1740s, becoming the town’s first colonial settler, and Charlemont was incorporated in 1765. 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.
This was the far edge of the colonial frontier, and it saw hard days. Settlement stayed thin until the early 1760s because of the valley’s continued exposure to attack. The town still marks and maintains the Moses Rice gravesite, a plain reminder of how exposed this valley once was.
The Mohawk Trail
Route 2 climbs through Charlemont as the Mohawk Trail, the scenic mountain road through the northern Berkshires, and tourism has been part of the local economy for more than a century. The river, the trail, and the forest are the reasons much of the town’s economy now points outward to visitors.
A Town That Owns Its Own Network
Charlemont’s civic story did not stop in the nineteenth century. Charlemont chose to build a fiber-optic network the town would own, rather than let a private carrier own the lines. Charlemont now delivers high-speed internet through its Municipal Light Plant, operated with Whip City Fiber. It is the same instinct that ran through the town two centuries earlier: in a place this size, the people in the room decide what the town does for itself.
Sources: Town of Charlemont (charlemont-ma.us); Massachusetts Historical Commission.
MassCivics last checked this page on September 26, 2026.
Sources
- Town records: Town of Charlemont, Moses Rice Gravesite Gets Some Much Needed Attention, as of August 17, 2026.