Montague, Massachusetts
A Short History of Montague
From a farming settlement on the Connecticut River, to a planned mill town built on water power, to five villages that decided in 1962 to govern themselves by a Town Meeting the precincts elect.
A Settlement on the River
Europeans first settled the area now called Montague Center in 1715, when it was still part of Sunderland, and Montague was incorporated as its own town in 1754. Long before that the land at the falls belonged to the Native people of the Connecticut River valley. The town grew slowly as a farming community until the river itself changed everything, because the same falls that made the river hard to travel made it perfect for turning machines.
Turners Falls, a Town Built on Purpose
In the mid-1800s a power canal was cut from the Connecticut River at the falls, and the village of Turners Falls was laid out from scratch as a planned mill community, its straight streets and brick blocks modeled loosely on Lowell. Water power drew factories, factories drew workers, and Turners Falls quickly became the largest of Montague’s villages, holding more than half the town’s people. Walk Avenue A today and you are walking the main street of a 19th-century industrial plan that is still standing.
Five Villages, One Town
Montague is really five villages under a single town government: Turners Falls, Montague Center, Montague City, Millers Falls, which it shares with the town of Erving, and Lake Pleasant, which grew up in the 19th century around a spiritualist camp meeting ground. Each village kept its own character, its own fire coverage, and in some cases its own name for the post office, while all five share one Town Meeting and one Selectboard.
Choosing Representative Town Meeting
By the middle of the 20th century Montague had grown too large for every voter to fit in one hall, so in 1962 the Legislature passed Chapter 398 of the Acts of 1962, an act establishing representative Town Government by limited Town Meetings. Under it, each precinct elects its own Town Meeting members, and those members cast the votes for everyone. The town has kept refining the system: Chapter 424 of the Acts of 1980 put candidates for Town Meeting member on the ballot by a lottery drawing, and Chapter 706 of the Acts of 1987 handed the Town Clerk the job of setting each precinct’s member count every January. It is a rare thing to be able to point at the exact law that decides how your town makes its decisions, and in Montague you can.
What the Town Owns
Montague holds two civic assets outright that most towns its size do not. It owns the Shea Theater, a 1927 movie house on Avenue A that the town leases to a nonprofit arts center for one dollar a year, and it owns all 227 acres of Turners Falls Municipal Airport, run by a five-member Airport Commission. Both are public property, which means both are decided in public rooms.
Sources: Town of Montague, Town Meeting Acts (montague-ma.gov); Wikipedia, Montague and Turners Falls, Massachusetts; U.S. Census Bureau.