Northampton, Massachusetts
A Short History of Northampton
Nonotuck land, a preacher who shook the colonies, an abolitionist silk commune, a college built on one woman’s will, and a mayor who became president. Northampton’s history is not a backdrop. It is an argument that never stopped.
Nonotuck
The land this city stands on is Nonotuck land, the meadows along the Connecticut River where people lived and farmed long before any English name appeared on a map. In 1653 English colonists petitioned the General Court for permission to inhabit the place they called Nonotuck, and in 1654 they settled it as Northampton. Every land-use fight the city has had since, and it has had many, started here: this has always been ground worth arguing over.
The Preacher Who Shook the Colonies
Jonathan Edwards served as pastor of Northampton’s First Church from 1729 to 1750, and his preaching helped ignite the Great Awakening, the religious revival that swept the American colonies. Then the town voted to dismiss him in 1750. Hold on to that detail: a congregation in a small river town heard one of the most famous voices in America, weighed it, and voted it out. People here have been overruling the powerful, by vote, for almost three centuries.
Silk and Freedom in Florence
From 1842 to 1846 the Northampton Association of Education and Industry ran a utopian, abolitionist community in the village of Florence, trying to build a just society around a silk mill. Sojourner Truth, the abolitionist and women’s rights leader, lived there for several years. The commune itself lasted only four years. The idea it tested, that a community could organize its own economy around its own values, is the same question a city budget answers every spring.
Sophia Smith’s Will
Smith College was founded in Northampton in 1871 under the will of Sophia Smith, who left her fortune to open a college for women at a time when almost no one would. It opened to its first class of 14 students in 1875. The city has also produced quieter kinds of fame: Sylvester Graham, the dietary reformer whose whole-wheat flour gave the graham cracker its name, lived and died here in the nineteenth century.
Becoming a City
Northampton accepted its city charter and was incorporated as a city on September 5, 1883, trading town meeting for an elected mayor and council. The structure has been amended since, but the basic bargain, one elected executive checked by an elected legislature, is the same one described on every page of this guide.
The Mayor Who Became President
Calvin Coolidge, later the 30th President of the United States, served as mayor of Northampton from 1910 to 1911, cutting city debt while raising teachers’ pay. The national career started at the local desk, with the least glamorous work in politics: a budget. If you ever doubt that city government is a real arena, remember that a President trained in this one.
Sources: City of Northampton; Historic Northampton; Smith College; the Miller Center at the University of Virginia; U.S. Census Bureau.