West Springfield, Massachusetts
A Short History of West Springfield
Nearly every border in this part of the state was drawn by people who found the trip to town hall too long. West Springfield is the clearest case.
The Far Side of the River
English colonists first settled the land west of the Connecticut River around 1660, when all of it still belonged to Springfield. For more than a century the river ran through the middle of daily life: every town meeting, every church service, every official errand meant getting across the water, in a boat, on the ice, or not at all. The people on the west bank were full members of a town whose center they could see and could not easily reach.
Tired of Rowing
On February 23, 1774, the residents of the west bank got themselves incorporated as their own town. The grievance behind the split was as practical as grievances get: they were done rowing to town meeting. The West Springfield they founded stretched far beyond today’s borders, taking in land that later split off to become Agawam and most of Holyoke, which means two of the town’s modern neighbors began as pieces of it. The name stuck as plain description, and so did the nickname: West Springfield is still known as West Side.
The Big E Comes to Town
In the 1910s a stretch of West Springfield became the fairgrounds of the Eastern States Exposition. The grounds hosted the National Dairy Show in 1916, and the first full exposition ran in 1917. The Big E, as everyone calls it, grew into the largest agricultural fair in the Northeast, and it carries one feature no other fair has: the Avenue of States, where all six New England states keep their own buildings on West Springfield soil. Once a year the town of 28,835 becomes the meeting ground for an entire region.
The Land the Town Kept
Growth never took all of it. Bear Hole Reservoir and its surrounding watershed were placed under a permanent conservation restriction, jointly bought by Mass Audubon and the state Department of Conservation and Recreation, so that land can never be developed. Mittineague Park runs about 325 acres along the bank of the Westfield River, combining conservation woodland with recreation fields. A town wedged between two rivers chose to keep a working forest and a park the size of a neighborhood, and that choice renews itself in every budget.
Modern West Springfield
Two and a half centuries after the incorporation vote, West Springfield is still legally a Town, and it is run by a Mayor and a nine member Town Council, a city government wearing a town’s name. The people who drew the original border by getting tired of rowing have successors with the same instinct for self-government: in November 2025 a townwide charter review put sixteen ballot questions to the voters, who worked through every one, approving fifteen and turning one down. The rulebook of West Springfield is still written by the people who live under it.
Sources: Britannica; Wikipedia; the Eastern States Exposition; Mass Audubon; the Town of West Springfield; The Reminder.