Plainfield, Massachusetts
A Short History of Plainfield
From a 1770 hill settlement on the edge of old Hampshire County, through a century of sheep and leather, to the fiber-optic line the town voted to build itself.
The Youngest Town in Hampshire County
Plainfield was first settled in 1770, mostly by families who came west from the town of Bridgewater. For its first years the settlement was part of Cummington, and in 1785 it was set off as a district within that town. On June 15, 1807, the Commonwealth incorporated Plainfield as a town in its own right, which makes it the youngest town in Hampshire County. It sits high in the western hills, spread thin across about 21 square miles where there has always been more land than people.
Sheep, Leather, and a Long Decline
In the 1800s Plainfield was a busy farming town, and two industries carried it: raising sheep and tanning leather. That prosperity turned on distance. When the steamship and the railroad shrank the world in the 1870s, mutton and hides shipped in cheaply from as far away as Australia and New Zealand, and the price of what Plainfield’s farms produced fell with them. The town’s industries thinned out and its population declined for decades. What did not change was how the town governed itself: the budget was still voted in a room by the people who lived there.
The Line the Town Built
The clearest modern proof of that habit runs to the houses themselves. When the big carriers decided that a town of a few hundred hill homes was not worth the cost of fast internet, Plainfield’s voters decided otherwise. At Town Meeting they agreed to fund a municipal fiber-optic network, working with the state’s Massachusetts Broadband Institute program, and the town now owns the gigabit line that reaches homes across the hills. It is the same civic machinery that built the town’s institutions two centuries ago: money on the books, a town meeting vote, and a thing that exists.
Neighbors Who Left a Mark
For its size Plainfield has kept surprising company. The poet William Cullen Bryant, who spent his boyhood in the neighboring hills, is tied to the town, as is the novelist Ralph Ellison and the author Charles McCarry. The town’s real distinction, though, is not a famous name. It is that a community this small still runs itself in person, in a hall, by a show of hands.
Sources: Town of Plainfield (plainfield-ma.us); Wikipedia, Plainfield, Massachusetts; U.S. Census Bureau.