Russell, Massachusetts
A Short History of Russell
Three cascades on one river, three mill villages built around them, and a town that decided to own its own electric company.
The Land and the First Settlement
This was Pocumtuc country, part of the territory of an Algonquian speaking people, and English settlement of these hills did not begin until about 1725, long after the Connecticut River valley below had filled up. Russell itself was carved out of the section of Westfield known as the New Addition and incorporated as a town in 1792. The early settlement grew up around Hazard Pond, which the town now calls Russell Pond, where grist mills, tanneries, and saw mills used the water that was there for the taking.
Three Cascades, Three Villages
The Westfield River drops about 90 feet through Russell over three widely separated cascades, and in the nineteenth century each one grew a village. When the railroad came through the Berkshire hills in 1841 it connected all three to the rest of the country, and the town’s whole shape changed. Crescent Mills sat upstream near the Huntington line, built around a Chapin and Gould Paper Company mill, and a mill still works that site today making specialty fabrics for shoes. Russell Village in the middle became the administrative center and the home of the Westfield River Paper Company. Woronoco, downstream, took its name from a local tribe, and its cascades were once called Salmon Falls.
The Company Town That Built Junior Achievement
Woronoco was not a village that happened. It was designed. Horace A. Moses bought the Strathmore Paper Company mill there in 1904, named it for the Scottish valley of Strathmore he had visited, and built the village around it with housing of a notably high standard and buildings meant for community life. Moses went on to co-found Junior Achievement, the organization that has taught business and civics to schoolchildren for a century. He also assembled a 1,600 acre estate in the South Quarter uplands around Russell Pond, and later sold parts of it to the Hampden Council of the Boy Scouts of America. That land is now the Horace A. Moses Scout Reservation, and his summer home still stands there.
The Town That Bought Its Own Electricity
In 1920 the residents of Russell decided that electric service ought to be owned locally, and they created the Russell Municipal Light Department. It is still theirs. Russell is one of roughly forty Massachusetts communities that own their electric utility outright, which means the profits come back to the town in rates and service rather than leaving it, and it means the people who set the policy are three commissioners the voters elect to three-year terms. If you want to see a town’s power structure in one object, this is it: an electric company on Main Street, run by a board you can run for.
Sending the Schools to Gateway
In 1965 Russell voted to stop running schools of its own and joined the Gateway Regional School District, which had been founded in 1957 by neighboring hilltowns. The district takes its name from the Westfield River route of the Underground Railroad, and a plaque at the entrance to Gateway Regional School says so: the towns that named it chose the word to honor this place and its role as a gateway to freedom, and to carry that meaning forward as a gateway to knowledge. Russell holds three of the district’s fifteen School Committee seats, and the town’s share of the Gateway budget is voted every year at Russell’s own Town Meeting.
Sources: Town of Russell, History and Town Data pages (townofrussell.us); Town of Russell General By-Laws; Russell Municipal Light Department; Gateway Regional School District (grsd.org); Wikipedia, Russell, Massachusetts; U.S. Census Bureau.