Monroe, Massachusetts
A Short History of Monroe
A hill town settled at the turn of the nineteenth century, named for a sitting president, and today the smallest town by population on the Massachusetts mainland.
Named for a President
Monroe was first settled around 1800, in the steep country of the Hoosac Range where Franklin County meets Vermont. When it was incorporated as a town in 1822, it took the name of the man then in the White House, President James Monroe. Very few Massachusetts towns can say their name and their founding date point at the same person: Monroe was made a town during Monroe’s presidency, and it has carried his name ever since.
The Smallest Town on the Mainland
Monroe has never been crowded. Its population peaked at 305 residents in 1900, then fell through the twentieth century to a low of 93 in the 2000 census, before edging back to 118 in 2020. By area, by population, and by density, it is the smallest town in Franklin County, and it is the smallest town by population anywhere on the Massachusetts mainland. Only Gosnold, a chain of islands off the coast, is smaller. That scale is not a footnote to Monroe’s civics. It is the whole story: it is why a Town Meeting here can be a room of a few dozen people, and why a single resident’s vote carries so much weight.
Paper and the Railroad
For most of a century, Monroe’s economy ran on one industry. In 1885 a railroad line was built between neighboring Readsboro, Vermont, and Holyoke, Massachusetts, to haul wood pulp to a paper factory, and that line drew the Ramage family to Monroe. They founded the James Ramage Paper Company in 1887, and it became the town’s main employer, running well into the twentieth century before it closed in the 1980s. The construction of the nearby Hoosac Tunnel, driven through the mountains just south of Monroe in the town of Florida, had brought the town some business a generation earlier.
Forest and River
Much of Monroe today is woods and water. Monroe State Forest covers the central and southern parts of the town and reaches into Florida, and its Dunbar Brook Trail climbs to Spruce Mountain and the Raycroft Lookout, past nineteenth-century cellar holes and stone walls that mark where earlier families lived. Along the town’s eastern edge runs the Deerfield River, which forms the boundary with Rowe and is dammed at the town’s southern end as the Sherman Reservoir. For a town this small, Monroe holds a great deal of open land.
Sources: Wikipedia, Monroe, Massachusetts (settlement 1800, incorporation 1822, population history, the Ramage Paper Company, and the Hoosac Tunnel); Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, Monroe State Forest; U.S. Census Bureau.