Sandisfield, Massachusetts
A Short History of Sandisfield
A town with a name found nowhere else in the country, the largest by land area in the Berkshires and one of the smallest by population, built by farmers and millwrights and then quietly emptied when the railroad passed it by.
1762, and a Name Like No Other
Sandisfield is the only municipality in the United States to carry the name, a tribute to Samuel Sandys, an eighteenth century British official who served as Lord of Trade and the Plantations. Settlers, mostly from the Connecticut Colony just to the south, began arriving in the 1750s at a tract then known as Housatonic Plantation No. 3. In 1762 it was incorporated as the Town of Sandisfield. Two hundred and fifty years later, in 2012, the town marked its Sestercentennial, counting its years from that 1762 vote.
The Railroad That Never Came
By the middle of the nineteenth century Sandisfield was one of the more prosperous towns in the southern Berkshires. Dairy farms worked the hillsides, and sawmills, tanneries and small manufacturers ran along its rivers. The population peaked around 1850 at roughly twice today’s level. Then a railroad line the town had counted on through the 1870s never materialized. The farm economy fell away, the population declined, and the cleared land grew back into forest. That is why a town of 52 square miles holds fewer than a thousand year-round residents today, and why so much of it is now woods, ponds and state land.
A Hundred Old Houses, and a Meetinghouse With Three Lives
What the decline left behind was preserved almost by accident. More than a hundred antique homes and public buildings still stand, many lovingly restored by long-time and seasonal residents alike. Three are on the National Register of Historic Places: the 1799 Philemon Sage House; the New Boston Inn, which has served travelers since about 1750; and the Greek Revival Baptist Meeting House, raised in 1839. That last building tells the town’s story in miniature. It served as a Baptist chapel, then for decades as a rural synagogue, and when it sat empty and failing a group of neighbors raised the money and reopened it in 1995 as the Sandisfield Arts Center, now a regional destination for music, theater and exhibitions.
The Knox Trail and the State Forest
History runs right through Sandisfield’s woods. In the winter of 1775 to 1776 Henry Knox hauled the captured cannon of Fort Ticonderoga across Massachusetts to the siege of Boston, and the route, the Knox Trail, passes near Spectacle Pond in the north of town, land recently folded into Otis State Forest. Sandisfield State Forest, York Lake, and the Farmington and Clam Rivers cover much of the town, which is one reason its full-time population of about 989 roughly doubles each summer.
The History the Town Keeps Itself
The Sandisfield Historical Society collects and preserves the town’s manuscripts and records and helps run its commemorations, and the town’s own archives of vital records, warrants and meeting minutes reach back to 1762. Preservation here is a civic act: projects to restore historic places come before Town Meeting, the room where every registered voter can stand up, which means the keeping of Sandisfield’s history is itself decided by the town.
Sources: Town of Sandisfield, About Sandisfield and Town History pages (sandisfieldma.gov); Sandisfield Sestercentennial 1762-2012; Sandisfield Arts Center; U.S. Census Bureau. Accessed 2026.