Conway, Massachusetts
A Short History of Conway
A Franklin County hilltown carved out of Deerfield, named for a British politician who took the colonies’ side, and home to a covered bridge, a domed library, and the man who gave both of them to the town.
Carved Out of Deerfield
The land that became Conway was first settled in 1762, on the western hills that had been part of Deerfield. Five years later, in 1767, the settlers won their own town charter and Conway was incorporated. The name honored General Henry Seymour Conway, a British member of Parliament who argued for repealing the Stamp Act, the tax the colonies had risen against. Naming the new town for him was a small political statement, made in wood and paper by farmers who would soon be at war with his king.
The Man Who Gave the Library
In 1834 a Conway farm produced a boy named Marshall Field, who left for Chicago and built the department store that carried his name, Marshall Field and Company. He did not forget the town. In 1901 Field gave Conway a library in memory of his parents, John and Fidelia Nash Field, and the building he paid for is not a plain brick box. The Field Memorial Library on Elm Street has a domed rotunda, Italian marble, and finished woodwork, an architect’s building in a town of about eighteen hundred people, and it is still the town’s library today.
The Covered Bridge
In the fall of 1869 a great flood tore through the New England hills and weakened the crossing over the South River in Conway center. The town replaced it in 1870 with a covered bridge designed by Sylvanus P. Sherman, built with a modified Howe truss and iron tensioning rods. The Burkeville Covered Bridge is one of only a handful of nineteenth-century covered bridges still standing in Massachusetts, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. A little to the north, the iron Bardwell’s Ferry Bridge of 1882 crosses the Deerfield River on the town’s edge and is on the Register as well.
Rivers, Weather, and a Town That Endures
Conway grew up around water. The South River runs through the village center and joins the Deerfield River along the northern line, and the mills those rivers once turned are part of why a town formed here at all. The same water has tested the town more than once. On February 25, 2017, an EF1 tornado touched down in Conway, recorded as the first February tornado in Massachusetts history, and the town cleaned up and carried on, as hilltowns do.
The Festival of the Hills
Since 1962 Conway has closed out each autumn with the Festival of the Hills, an all-volunteer celebration of the Western Massachusetts hilltowns held at the town field in Conway center. It raises scholarship money for the town’s graduating students, and its Covered Bridge Classic road race starts at the Burkeville Covered Bridge and finishes at the Field Memorial Library, tying together two of the things Conway is proudest of. A town that governs itself in one room every June also throws itself a party every fall, and both are run by the people who show up.
Sources: Wikipedia, Conway and Burkeville Covered Bridge (2026); Town of Conway (conwayma.gov); Field Memorial Library (fieldmemoriallibrary.org); Festival of the Hills (festivalofthehills.com); the Greenfield Recorder.