Chester, Massachusetts
A Short History of Chester
From a Berkshire hill plantation called Murrayfield, to the granite quarries and emery mills that gave it the name Gem of the Valley, to the stone arches that carried the first railroad over a mountain range.
Murrayfield, and the Name Chester
The land that is now Chester was sold at auction in 1762 as Plantation Number 9, and the Massachusetts General Court incorporated it as the town of Murrayfield on October 31, 1765. The name caused constant confusion with a nearby place called Myrifield, so the town petitioned for a change, and on February 21, 1783 the General Court renamed it Chester. That date is the one still carved on the town seal, above a picture of the railroad that would arrive sixty years later.
The Gem of the Valley
Chester calls itself the Gem of the Valley, and the name comes from what came out of its hills. In the nineteenth century the town was a center of the granite and emery industries, cutting building stone and mining the hard abrasive mineral used to grind and polish metal. The quarries and mills drew workers and rail traffic, and they are the reason a town this small once had the industry to matter to the whole region.
The Railroad and the Keystone Arches
On May 24, 1841 the Western Railroad reached Chester, and to get there it had to cross the gorge of the Westfield River. The engineers Major George Washington Whistler and William Gibbs McNeill answered with the Keystone Arch Bridges: tall spans of hand-cut granite, laid without mortar or steel, that still stand in the hills above Chester, Middlefield, and Becket. They are the oldest railroad stone-arch bridges in the United States, and seven of the original ten survive. In 2021 the Western Railroad Stone Arch Bridges and the Chester Factory Village Depot were added to the National Register of Historic Places, and the restored depot is now a museum you can visit.
The Summer Stage
In 1990 a professional theater company took up residence in Chester and began staging plays each summer, and the Chester Theatre Company has performed in town ever since, often in the same Town Hall where the Select Board meets the rest of the year. For a town of about 1,200 people, a professional theater season is an unusual thing to have, and it is one of the reasons Chester’s name travels well beyond the hilltowns.
One School for Six Towns
Chester’s schools are not Chester’s alone. In 1957 the town joined five hilltown neighbors, Blandford, Huntington, Middlefield, Montgomery, and Russell, to form the Gateway Regional School District, and in 1963 the new regional high school opened on Littleville Road in Huntington. Chester keeps its own elementary school in town and elects its share of the district’s committee, which is why a Chester resident’s vote still reaches all the way into a classroom.
Sources: Town of Chester (townofchester.net); Wikipedia, Chester, Massachusetts and Western Railroad Stone Arch Bridges and Chester Factory Village Depot; Mass.gov and the Western Massachusetts Scenic Byways program on the Keystone Arch Bridges; Gateway Regional School District (grsd.org).