Colrain, Massachusetts
A Short History of Colrain
From a hilltop schoolhouse that raised the first American flag ever flown over a public school, to the birthplace of the Pequot writer and minister William Apess, to a hill town that in our own century voted to own its broadband outright.
Settled in 1735, Incorporated in 1761
Settlers first made homes in this stretch of hills north of Shelburne Falls in 1735, and the town was incorporated in 1761. 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. The town marked its 250th anniversary in 2011.
The First Flag Over a Schoolhouse
In 1812, by the account a stone marker on Catamount Hill keeps, Colrain became the first place in the United States to fly the American flag over a public schoolhouse, at the school in the hilltop village of Catamount. It is a small claim about a small building, and it captures something true about the town: the schoolhouse, not the statehouse, was where public life happened in a place this size.
William Apess
Colrain was the birthplace of William Apess, a Pequot author, public speaker, Methodist minister, and civil rights activist, born here in 1798. He returned about twenty years later to raise his family and begin his ministry, and is believed to have delivered his first sermon at the same Catamount Hill schoolhouse in 1819. With Blind Joe Amos, a Mashpee Wampanoag, he co-authored the Mashpee Declaration of Independence on May 21, 1833, a landmark in the fight for Native self-government in Massachusetts. In 2021 the Select Board adopted a proclamation naming May 21 William Apess Day in Colrain, and the Griswold Memorial Library keeps a historical marker in his honor.
A Town That Owns Its Own Network
Colrain’s civic story did not stop in the nineteenth century. In 2015 Town Meeting voted up to $2,400,000 to build a broadband network through the town’s Municipal Light Plant, a utility owned by the town itself, with the elected Select Board serving as its commissioners. The town then built out a fiber network of its own, carrying high-speed internet up the hill roads. It is the same instinct that flew a flag over the Catamount schoolhouse two centuries earlier: in a town this size, the people in the room decide what the town does for itself.
Sources: Town of Colrain, About Colrain (colrain-ma.gov); the Town of Colrain William Apess Proclamation (adopted May 18, 2021); the Catamount Hill Schoolhouse Flag-Raising Bicentennial; the Town of Colrain Annual Town Meeting of May 5, 2015.
MassCivics last checked this page on October 14, 2026.
Sources
- Town records: Town of Colrain, About Colrain, as of October 13, 2026.
- Town records: Town of Colrain, Annual Town Meeting Warrant FY2016, as voted (May 5, 2015), as of May 5, 2015.
- Town records: Town of Colrain, The Town of Colrain Proclaims May 21st William Apess Day (adopted May 18, 2021), as of May 18, 2021.