Hinsdale, Massachusetts
A Short History of Hinsdale
From a Berkshire hill parish called Partridgefield, to a woolen mill town on a transcontinental railroad, to a Town Meeting that bought back its own lakefront.
Partridgefield
Hinsdale began as part of a much larger frontier grant. The land was first settled in 1763 and organised as part of Northern Berkshire Township Number 2, a tract that then included all of what is now Peru and pieces of Middlefield and Dalton. In 1771 it was incorporated under the name Partridgefield, for Oliver Partridge, one of the three men who had purchased the town, along with the royal governor Francis Bernard. For its first decades this was not one town but a scattering of hill farms trying to become one.
A Town of Its Own, 1804
The western parish and the eastern parish did their public business separately for years, and in 1804 they made the split permanent. The western parish broke away and incorporated on its own, and it took a new name from the family of the Reverend Theodore Hinsdale, a local minister who also owned an important woolen mill. That is the town you live in. It is worth sitting with: Hinsdale exists as a separate town because residents decided it should, in the same form of meeting that still votes your budget today.
The Mill
For more than a century the woolen mill was the center of Hinsdale’s economy, the reason people came and the reason they stayed. It ran through the boom years of American manufacturing and into the twentieth century, and it closed during the Great Depression, when the market for its cloth collapsed. Losing a single mill in a town this small was losing the main engine of local work, and Hinsdale spent the decades afterward becoming the quieter residential and recreational town it is now.
The Railroad Through Town
Hinsdale sits on the Boston and Albany Railroad, the line that carries the Lake Shore Limited, a passenger train that has run between Boston and Chicago since 1897. The Hinsdale depot stood in the town center until it closed in 1954, but the tracks are still the same corridor that first tied this hill town to the rest of the country. If you have ever heard a train from the center of Hinsdale, you have heard a route older than the automobile.
The Beach the Town Bought
The most recent chapter is one residents wrote themselves. In May 2019 an open Town Meeting voted, unanimously, to spend $35,000 to buy the former Lions Club waterfront on Plunkett Reservoir and open it to the public. A seven-member Plunkett Beach Committee runs it now. In a town where the woolen mill and the railroad depot are both gone, it is a reminder of what the open Town Meeting can still do: turn a private shoreline into a public one, on the strength of a single afternoon’s vote.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinsdale,_Massachusetts (with its own cited sources); Town of Hinsdale, hinsdalemass.com.