Cummington, Massachusetts
A Short History of Cummington
From a 1762 land purchase called Township Number Five, to the water-powered mills and the Cummington Fair, to the town meeting that voted to run fiber optic cable to every house in the hills.
Township Number Five
Cummington began in 1762 as a tract called Township Number Five, purchased by Colonel John Cumings of Concord and settled that spring by a surveyor named Samuel Brewer. The town takes its name from Cumings. For its first years the affairs of the church and the town were handled together at town meeting, and on June 23, 1779 Township Number Five was officially incorporated as the Town of Cummington. It took about a decade of sorting out before the town meeting form of government that Cummington still uses settled into place.
Mills, Farms, and the Cummington Fair
Through the 1800s the rivers and streams that run down these hills turned Cummington into a working industrial town: sawmills, gristmills, tanneries, and woolen and cotton mills lined the water, and by 1830 the population had risen to about 1,200. The land was farmed hard too. The Hillside Agricultural Society, a group of farmers from the surrounding towns, held its first Cattle Show on Main Street in 1869, hoping to keep young people in farming. In the late 1800s Cummington counted about 180 farms. The mills are gone and the farms are far fewer, but the Cummington Fair still fills the fairgrounds every August.
The Poet on the Hill
Cummington’s best-known son is William Cullen Bryant, the poet and newspaper editor who grew up here and walked the woods above the family farm. His boyhood home, the William Cullen Bryant Homestead, is now a historic site of the Trustees of Reservations, open to the public, with the Rivulet Trail running through old-growth forest along the stream he wrote about. The town’s Kingman Tavern, run as a historical museum, keeps the rest of the town’s story.
The Town That Built Its Own Internet
Cummington’s most recent chapter is one of the more remarkable in the state. When broadband companies would not run cable to a town this small and this spread out, the voters decided to do it themselves. At town meeting they chartered a Municipal Light Plant, then in 2017 voted to borrow $1.4 million against their own property taxes to string fiber optic cable through the hills. The town-owned gigabit service came on line in 2020, a public utility governed by a Municipal Light Plant Board that Cummington voters elect. It is the same machinery that built the library and runs the fair: a room full of neighbors, a vote, and a thing that did not exist before.
Sources: Town of Cummington history and profile pages (cummington-ma.gov); the town’s lite civic record; U.S. Census Bureau.