Leverett, Massachusetts
A Short History of Leverett
From a corner of Sunderland that petitioned its way to independence in 1774, to mill villages along the brooks, to a Peace Pagoda in the hills and a fiber network the town built for itself.
Before the Town
Long before Leverett was a town, indigenous peoples hunted, fished, and lived across this ground for thousands of years. The land itself is unusual: geologists still study the rock of the Mount Toby quadrangle, and Rattlesnake Gutter, a deep boulder-filled ravine on the eastern side of town, has drawn theories about whether it was cut by meltwater under a glacier or opened along an old fault line. The views from Brushy Mountain, Ingraham Hill, and Laurel Hill take in the Connecticut River valley, and the town’s ponds, streams, and forests have shaped how people lived here for a very long time.
1774, and a Town of Its Own
Leverett became a town in 1774, when it successfully petitioned the colonial government to be set off from Sunderland. It took its name from John Leverett, an early governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who was remembered for standing against religious persecution. That founding is worth sitting with: the town exists because residents asked for the right to govern their own affairs, in the same form of open Town Meeting that still votes the budget today.
Mills, Brooks, and Moore’s Corner
Leverett’s first century was an active, industrious one. Factories, mills, and shops lined the Red Brook and Sawmill Rivers in the north of town and Roaring Brook in the east, supplying the tools and goods that self-sufficient farms and homesteads needed. General stores anchored each of the four village centers, and for a time the Watson General Store in Moore’s Corner was the largest general store in Franklin County. Then the railroad, electricity, the automobile, and the First World War changed everything: jobs moved to the cities, and self-sufficiency gave way to a quieter, more residential town.
One School, and New Neighbors
In 1950 Leverett took a giant step for a rural town, replacing the nine one-room schoolhouses scattered across its corners with a single consolidated elementary school. After the Second World War the growing University of Massachusetts drew students and faculty to the affordable colonial houses of the town, and in the decades that followed craftspeople, artists, and homesteaders settled in the northern part of Leverett, giving the town a distinctive, independent-minded character it still carries.
A Peace Pagoda in the Hills
Among the faith communities that have made their home in Leverett is the Nipponzan-Myohoji Buddhist order, which built a Peace Pagoda here in the wooded hills. It draws visitors from far beyond the town and has become one of Leverett’s most recognized landmarks.
The Town That Wired Itself
When broadband companies decided Leverett was too small and too spread out to be worth the wire, the town answered in the way it has answered questions since 1774: at Town Meeting. In 2012 residents voted 306 to 33 to borrow 3.6 million dollars to build a municipal fiber-optic network, and then agreed at the ballot box, 426 to 90, to raise their own property taxes to pay it back. The result is the Leverett Municipal Light Plant, a broadband utility the town owns outright, and a modern example of the same self-government that founded the town.
Sources: Town of Leverett, Leverett History (leverett.ma.us/p/10); Leverett Municipal Light Plant (leverett.ma.us/p/33); U.S. Census Bureau.