How It Got Here
Greenfield History
Four Forms of Government in 270 Years
Greenfield was incorporated on June 9, 1753, and for its first 168 years it governed itself by open town meeting, where any registered voter could show up and vote. In 1921 a special act of the Legislature replaced that with a representative town meeting. In 1983 the voters approved a home rule charter with a five member select board, a 27 member town council and a town manager. Then on June 11, 2002 they approved a revised charter that created a mayor and a city council, and on July 1, 2003 it took effect.
The 2002 Charter Commission did one more thing, at the urging of residents: it kept calling the place the Town of Greenfield even though the charter had made it a city in form. For fifteen years the city’s legal name was the City known as the Town of Greenfield. In December 2017 the Town Council voted to drop the words. On January 17, 2019 Governor Baker signed the amendment, and Greenfield became, plainly, the City of Greenfield.
The Rivers, and What They Powered
Greenfield sits just north of the confluence of the Green, the Deerfield and the Connecticut rivers, with the Green and the Deerfield bounding the downtown to the south and west and Poet’s Seat Ridge closing it in to the east. Those rivers were the first transportation the town had, and then they were its power source: they drove the manufacturing that made Greenfield a tool and die center in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Today the same geography carries Route 2 and Interstate 91 through the city, and the John W. Olver Transit Center downtown puts a train to New York, Vermont and Montreal within walking distance of Main Street.
The City That Built Its Own Internet
Greenfield Community Energy and Technology, which everyone calls GCET, is a Municipal Light Plant owned by the City of Greenfield. A Municipal Light Plant is a public entity created under Chapter 164 of the Massachusetts General Laws, the same law that lets a community own its electric or gas utility, and Greenfield used it to own a telecommunications company instead. GCET was formed with the approval of the voters and the unanimous support of the Town Council in 2014 and again in 2015, and the state Legislature created it in 2015. It sells fiber internet, phone and television service to Greenfield homes and businesses, and a five member board of directors appointed by the Mayor oversees it.
A Library, Twice
From 1909 until June 17, 2023 the Greenfield Public Library lived in the Leavitt-Hovey House, a building designed by Asher Benjamin, who wrote the first architectural pattern book published in America, and built in 1797. In 2018 the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners voted a provisional grant of $9.4 million toward a replacement, on the condition that Greenfield finance another $2 million of the cost with local funds. Some residents said plainly that they were worried about what the project would do to their taxes, and the Library Board of Trustees answered by forming an independent foundation to raise money privately.
The new library opened next door to the old one on July 13, 2023. More than 500 people came to the grand opening and more than 1,000 walked through in the first day. On July 28, 2025 the building was awarded LEED certification.
Sources
Charter and government history from the City of Greenfield’s own City Council page and Mayor’s Office page at greenfield-ma.gov. GCET from gcet.net. Library history from the Greenfield Public Library. Geography and transportation from the Mayor’s Office welcome page. All read August 2026.
The government those votes created is on the next page.