Washington, Massachusetts
A Short History of Washington
From a hill town named for a General still fighting his war, to one of the largest stretches of protected forest in the state, to a town that decided to wire itself.
Named for a General
Washington was incorporated in 1777, in the middle of the Revolution, and it was one of the first towns in the country to take the name of George Washington, who at the time was still only a General in the Continental Army rather than the first President. The town sits in the hills of central Berkshire County along what was once the main stage route between Boston and Albany, New York, so travelers crossing the state on the old road passed through it long before there were highways below the ridgeline.
A Town of Forest and Water
Washington covers about 38.8 square miles, and nearly two thirds of that is in conservation. The entire western half of town is made up of October Mountain State Forest, the largest state forest in Massachusetts, together with protected Pittsfield Watershed lands. The headwaters of the East Branch of the Housatonic River rise here too, flowing out of Muddy Pond and down toward the valley. It is a small town by population, fewer than 500 residents, spread across a lot of mostly wooded ground.
The Town That Wired Itself
When the big internet companies would not run high-speed service up the mountain, Washington decided to run it for itself. The town voted the borrowing at Town Meeting, formed the Washington Municipal Light Plant to build and manage the network, and by 2020 had strung its own fiber past almost every home, reaching about 99 percent of houses in town. Washington is a charter member of the WiredWest cooperative, a group of small western Massachusetts towns that pool the cost of running municipal broadband, with Whip City Fiber of Westfield delivering the service. It is a plain example of what open Town Meeting can do: a few hundred neighbors in a room decided their town would build a utility, and it did.
Sources: Town of Washington (washington-ma.gov), About Washington and Washington MLP pages; Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, October Mountain State Forest; U.S. Census Bureau.