Florida, Massachusetts
A Short History of Florida
From a grant of the Equivalent Lands high on the Hoosac Range, to a boom town for the men who bored a railroad straight through the mountain, to one of the most forested corners of Massachusetts.
The Berkshire Equivalent
Florida began as a piece of the Equivalent Lands, the tract the colonies traded to settle a boundary dispute, and most of what is now the town was granted to Bernardston around 1771. The first settler, Dr. Daniel Nelson, arrived about 1783 and cleared ground on the high, cold plateau. When the town was incorporated in 1805 it took the name Florida, reportedly because Spanish Florida was a subject of much discussion in those years, an odd choice for one of the snowiest towns in the Commonwealth.
Maple, Wool, and Potatoes
For its first decades Florida was a farming town, and the crops that suited a mountain that spends part of the year in cloud were maple syrup, wool, and potatoes. The land was never easy. What changed the town was not its fields but the mountain underneath them.
The Hoosac Tunnel
In the middle of the nineteenth century Florida became a boom town for the crews building the Hoosac Tunnel, a railroad tunnel almost five miles long that begins in the town’s southeast corner and runs clear through the mountain. It took nearly a quarter of a century to complete and opened in 1875, and when it did it was one of the longest tunnels in the world. The work drew hundreds of laborers to a town that had counted its people in the low hundreds, and the tunnel’s east portal is still Florida’s most famous landmark.
Hawthorne on the Mountain
Nathaniel Hawthorne passed through and wrote about this country in his American Notebooks, though he called the town Latrobe rather than Florida and described the Hoosac Range as “the Green Mountain.” The writer was drawn, as visitors still are, to the sweep of the ridgeline and the sense of being above the ordinary map of Massachusetts.
Whitcomb Summit and the Elk
The Mohawk Trail, opened as a scenic auto road in the early twentieth century, runs straight over the top of the town at Whitcomb Summit, 2,172 feet up and the highest point in Florida. A bronze elk stands there as a monument to the Elk Club, which built and maintained the trails and had worked on the tunnel, and on a clear day the view runs west to the Taconic Range and down into the Deerfield River valley. Today Florida is one of the most heavily forested towns in the state, with roughly 93 percent of its land under trees.
A Town of a Few Hundred
Florida never grew into a city, and that is part of its story. Its villages, chief among them Drury, string along the Mohawk Trail, and its people still gather in one room to vote the town’s budget in open Town Meeting, the same form of government the town has used since 1805. In a place this small, the distance between a resident and a decision is about as short as it gets in American government.
Sources: Town of Florida official history (townofflorida.org/history.html); Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Notebooks; the Hoosac Tunnel historical record.