How It Got Here
Easthampton History
A Button Factory Built This City
In 1847 Samuel Williston, the son of the town’s first minister, moved his button business to Easthampton, and the original 1847 button factory is still standing. The next year he added a suspender factory and called it the Nashawannuck Manufacturing Company. In 1859, to stop buying his materials from someone else, he built the Williston Mills to spin his own cotton yarn and started the first elastic web company in the United States. To run all of it he dammed Broad Brook, and the ponds in the middle of Easthampton are the water he backed up to turn his machinery.
That decision shaped the street map. The mills needed workers, the workers needed houses and roads, and the neighborhood residents still call New City is what got built to hold them. The same brick buildings later spun cotton for Henry Ford’s automobile tires and made Stanley Home Products, and today they house Riverside Industries, Cottage Street Studios and Eastworks. A student walking down Pleasant Street is walking through a nineteenth century industrial decision that never quite stopped paying out.
From District to Town to City
Easthampton was set off as a district on June 17, 1785 and incorporated as a town in 1809, and for most of two centuries it ran the way most Massachusetts towns still do, on a town meeting. That ended on April 1, 1996, when the voters approved a Home Rule Charter and Easthampton became a city with a mayor and a city council. The City Clerk’s office, which still holds both the town meeting records and the city council records, dates the change to that day.
The charter has not sat still since. The Legislature has amended it five times at the city’s request, in 1999, 2011, 2019, 2022 and 2024, and the biggest changes came in one package. Chapter 75 of the Acts of 2019, ratified by Easthampton voters on November 5, 2019, lengthened the mayor’s term from two years to four and wrote ranked choice voting into the charter’s own definitions.
The City That Ranks Its Ballots
Easthampton is one of a small number of Massachusetts cities that counts its own elections by ranked choice voting, and the rule sits in the charter rather than in a policy someone can quietly change. A voter ranks the candidates in order of preference. If a candidate takes at least 50 percent of the first choice votes, that candidate wins outright. If nobody does, an instant runoff happens automatically: the candidate with the fewest votes is withdrawn, every ballot that ranked that candidate first moves to its next choice, and the count runs again until somebody clears 50 percent.
It is not theoretical. In the November 4, 2025 election for mayor no candidate cleared 50 percent on the first count, the third place candidate was eliminated, and the second count elected Salem Derby. The two contested precinct council races that night, in Precincts 4 and 5, were tabulated by ranked choice as well, and each was settled on the first count. If you vote in Easthampton, your second choice is a real vote.
The Vote That Built Mountain View School
On May 22, 2018 Easthampton held a special city election with one question on the ballot: a debt exclusion for a pre-K to grade 8 school. It passed 2,831 to 2,102, on 4,934 ballots cast, and precinct by precinct it was close enough that a few hundred voters decided it. What the yes vote bought was a $109 million building that replaced three elementary schools, Center, Pepin and Maple, and White Brook Middle School, all at once. Mountain View School opened in 2022 and its formal ribbon cutting was held on September 6 of that year.
The old buildings have not disappeared from the city’s paperwork. Open the Easthampton Agenda Center today and the archived agendas for the Center and Pepin School Council, the Maple School Council and the White Brook Middle School Council are still sitting there beside Mountain View School’s, which is a fair picture of how long a school consolidation actually takes to finish.
The government those votes created is on the next page.
MassCivics last checked this page on October 20, 2026.
Sources
- City records: City of Easthampton, RCV Detailed Report, November 4, 2025, Unofficial Results, as of November 4, 2025.
- City Clerk records: City of Easthampton, 2018 Special City Election Results, as of May 22, 2018.
- History and incorporation: Secretary of the Commonwealth, City and Town Incorporation and Settlement Dates, as of 1809.