Chesterfield, Massachusetts
A Short History of Chesterfield
From a hill town of Merino sheep and cloth mills, to a granite gorge the whole region comes to see, to a town that decided to run its own fiber network when the big carriers would not.
Settled 1760, Incorporated 1762
Chesterfield was first settled in 1760 and incorporated as a town in 1762, and it took its name from the Earl of Chesterfield. It sits in the hills west of Northampton, on the East Branch of the Westfield River, in the cluster of small upland towns Massachusetts still calls the Hilltowns. From the start it was a farming town, worked by families spread across a lot of steep ground, and it settled its public business the same way it does now: at Town Meeting, where every voter has a say.
Sheep, Sawmills, and Cloth
For its first century Chesterfield lived on agriculture, and above all on wool. The Merino sheep that grazed these hills fed a local industry of sawmills, tanneries, and cloth-dressing mills, and by the early nineteenth century those mills had begun to draw workers, including Irish immigrants, into the town. Most of that industry later faded as the mills moved to larger rivers and cities, and Chesterfield turned back toward farming and, in time, toward the summer residents who still come for the hills.
The Gorge and the Stone Bridge
Chesterfield’s best-known place is Chesterfield Gorge, where the East Branch of the Westfield River has cut a steep channel through solid granite. It is now a property of The Trustees of Reservations, open to anyone, and it still holds the stone abutment of an old arch bridge that once carried the post road between Boston and Albany. Long before the interstate, that road ran travelers and mail straight through these hills, and the river below the gorge is part of the federally protected Westfield River Wild and Scenic corridor.
A Town That Grew, Shrank, and Held On
Chesterfield was bigger two centuries ago than it is today. Its population peaked at 1,447 in 1820, then fell for more than a hundred years as farming families left the hills, reaching a low of about 420 residents in 1930. It has climbed back since, to 1,186 in the 2020 census. That long dip and slow recovery is the story of a lot of western Massachusetts, and it is why a town of this size runs so much of its government through volunteers and shared regional services.
The Town That Built Its Own Internet
When the national carriers decided that a thousand people scattered across the Hampshire hills were not worth stringing fiber to, Chesterfield did not wait. Using a Massachusetts law that lets any town create a Municipal Light Plant, voters stood up at Town Meeting and voted to build a town-owned gigabit fiber network. The result is that the internet coming into a Chesterfield house belongs to the town itself. It is the clearest modern example of the thing this whole guide is about: in Chesterfield, a big decision is still made by the people who show up.
Sources: Wikipedia, Chesterfield, Massachusetts (settlement and incorporation, industry, population history); The Trustees of Reservations (Chesterfield Gorge); Town of Chesterfield (Municipal Light Plant and broadband); U.S. Census Bureau.