Hatfield, Massachusetts
A Short History of Hatfield
From Norwottuck planting grounds on the Connecticut River, to a town that seceded over a church, to the tobacco fields that made it one of the richest farming communities in the valley.
The River and the Norwottuck
Long before any English settler arrived, the flat, stone-free land along the west bank of the Connecticut River was home to the Norwottuck people, part of the wider Nonotuck world of the Pioneer Valley. The same qualities that drew them, deep floodplain soil and a river full of fish, are the ones that would define Hatfield for the next three centuries. English colonists moving up the river settled here around 1660 on land purchased from the Norwottuck, and they built their homes close together on the plain that is still the center of town.
1670, and the Town That Seceded
For its first years the settlement was part of Hadley, on the east side of the river. The families on the west bank asked to build a church of their own so they would not have to cross the Connecticut every week, and Hadley refused. So they held a vote on whether to split off into a town of their own, and the vote to secede won. Hatfield was incorporated as a separate town in 1670. It is a founding story that fits the place: a room full of residents, a vote, and a decision that still shapes the map, in the same form of town meeting that votes the budget today.
Onions, Broomcorn, and Tobacco
Hatfield’s fortune was its soil. The town’s deep floodplain land made farming its main business for generations, known first for onions, then for a booming broomcorn industry in the early 1800s that lasted into the 1860s, and then, by the middle of the nineteenth century, for tobacco. Hatfield grew so much of it that it became one of the largest tobacco-growing towns in the region, and the long, low tobacco barns that dried the leaf became part of the landscape. Farming never left. Much of the town is still open agricultural land, which is exactly why residents keep voting to protect it.
The Center That Stayed
Because the town grew around farming rather than factories, its heart was never torn down and rebuilt. Main Street is preserved today as the Hatfield Center Historic District, a stretch of well-kept eighteenth and nineteenth century houses that traces the town’s whole history in one walk. The Hatfield Historical Society keeps that story in two museums, a Farm Museum for the agricultural history and a Historical Museum for everything else, both run by volunteers on behalf of the town.
Three Hundred and Fifty Years
Hatfield marked its 350th anniversary in 2020, three and a half centuries after that first vote to secede. The town organized the celebration the way it does most things, through a volunteer committee of residents. And the civic instinct that founded the town is still visible in its choices: when a developer proposed eighteen houses on the Sliwoski Farm in 2019, Town Meeting voted to spend $120,000 of Community Preservation money to keep the 22 acres in farming instead. The same room that made Hatfield a town in 1670 is still deciding what it will be.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org, Hatfield, Massachusetts and Hatfield Center Historic District; americancenturies.org; the Hatfield Historical Society (hatfieldhistory.weebly.com); hatfield350.com; the town Community Preservation Committee.