Huntington, Massachusetts
A Short History of Huntington
A town stitched together from the edges of its neighbors, at the point where three towns and two counties once met, and named for the Northampton lawyer who untangled it.
A Town Assembled From Its Neighbors
Huntington was not laid out all at once. In 1773 the district of Norwich was set off from Murrayfield, the older grant that was itself renamed Chester in 1783, and over the following decades pieces of the surrounding towns were grafted onto Norwich. The village that became the town’s center grew up at an awkward spot: the meeting point of three towns and two counties, a tangle of jurisdiction that made ordinary business hard.
The Railroad, and a New Name
The knot pulled tight in the 1840s. When the railroad reached the valley and brought industry and people with it, the confusion of overlapping boundaries became untenable. A Northampton attorney named Charles P. Huntington worked out the arrangement that drew the pieces into one town, and in 1855 the Massachusetts General Court incorporated it under his name. He gave the new town a gift of $100 to found its library. That is decades later than the towns around it, which is why Huntington’s incorporation date looks so out of place on a map of the hilltowns.
The Rivers and the Dam
The Westfield River runs through Huntington and is joined by its West Branch right at the village, and the river has shaped the town as much as any vote. Between 1939 and 1941 the federal government built the Knightville Dam on the East Branch for flood control, and the project erased two small settlements in the north of town, the villages of Knightville and Indian Hollow, whose names survive mostly on old maps. The Westfield is today one of the state’s designated Wild and Scenic rivers.
The School the Town Voted For
Huntington’s most consequential modern decision was made at the ballot box. In 1957 the town joined with Blandford, Chester, Middlefield, Montgomery, and Russell to form the Gateway Regional School District, and in 1963 the new regional high school opened on Littleville Road in Huntington. Six small towns had agreed to educate their teenagers together, and they still do. The district office and the high school sit in Huntington to this day, which is why a town of two thousand people is the seat of a school system serving six.
Sources: Town of Huntington, “Huntington History” (huntingtonma.us); Wikipedia, “Huntington, Massachusetts” and “Gateway Regional School District (Massachusetts)”; Gateway Regional School District (grsd.org).