Middlefield, Massachusetts
A Short History of Middlefield
A town stitched together from the corners of five others, incorporated in 1783, that grew into a wool-mill village high on the Westfield River and then let the hills reclaim it.
A Town Made from Five
Middlefield does not sit on land that was ever one place. It was assembled from the outlying areas of five neighboring towns, Chester, Becket, Washington, Peru, and Worthington, together with a large tract called Prescott’s Grant. Twelve families, many of them from Hebron, Connecticut, found their way up to this high, rugged plateau by 1774, and just ten years later, when the town was incorporated in 1783, there were 68 resident families. One of the first orders of business was to raise taxes to build roads, because only two decent roads existed and the rest were ox-cart trails that turned to mud every spring.
Six Years to Site a Church
A town cobbled together from five different settlements had no natural center, and it showed. Deciding where to put the meetinghouse, for worship, for gatherings, and for public meetings, took six years and thirty town meetings before the many strong opinions could agree. The corner they settled on, where Skyline Trail meets Town Hill Road, is where the Middlefield Church stands today. In the run-up to the Revolution most Middlefielders were Whigs who favored independence, and the town was strongly Federalist: it voted to adopt the proposed U.S. Constitution of 1787 and voted against the War of 1812. By the Civil War the town counted itself in the party of Lincoln and against slavery, and it supplied 86 men for the Union army.
Wool, Sheep, and Factory Village
The years from 1775 to 1830 were Middlefield’s era of growth, as new roads linked it to Hartford, Springfield, and Pittsfield. The town’s rocky pastures proved just right for grazing, and in the early 1800s nearly three quarters of its forestland was cleared for sheep. Uriah Church built the town’s first woolen mill in 1810 along Factory Brook, and wool-cloth manufacturing flourished in what became Factory Village. By 1840 the human population had reached 686 while the sheep numbered 9,840. When the Western Railroad reached the highlands, its station near Bancroft carried Middlefield’s wool and dairy products out to market.
Flood, Fire, and After
By 1870 Middlefield was a thriving manufacturing town, and then three blows fell close together: a slump in the wool market brought on by new tariffs, a fire that destroyed the Church woolen mill, and a dam failure in 1874 that sent the town reservoir crashing down into Factory Village, wrecking homes and mills. The woolen industry never recovered and ended by 1915. As the mills closed, summer visitors and a quiet cultural life took their place, with ties to Oberlin College and Smith College, and the town settled into the landscape of highland ridges and river valleys that draws people to it still.
Sources: Town of Middlefield, “Middlefield History” (middlefield-ma.gov), compiled by Jack Cobb and Cathy Roth from “A History of Middlefield, Massachusetts” by Edward Church Smith and Phillip Mack Smith (1924) and the 1999 National Register application prepared by the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission.