Whately, Massachusetts
A Short History of Whately
From a Nonotuck hunting ground at the foot of Mount Sugarloaf, to a town carved out of North Hatfield and named for a member of Parliament, to red-clay potters, winter broom-makers, and one of the few places outside Indonesia that grows fine Sumatra tobacco.
Before the Town Line
People have lived on this ground for a very long time. A Paleo Indian hunting camp near the base of Mount Sugarloaf carries human activity here back twelve to thirteen thousand years, and several of Whately’s north-south roads still follow the Native trails that came before them. The land belonged to the Nonotuck. In 1672 the town of Hatfield bought it from the widow and children of Quonquont, a Nonotuck sachem, and for the next century what is now Whately was the northern part of Hatfield.
1771, and a Name From Parliament
Whately was set off from Hatfield and incorporated as its own town on April 26, 1771. Governor Thomas Hutchinson named it for Thomas Whately, a member of the British Parliament and a writer on landscape gardening. The name is the kind of small historical accident worth noticing: a farming settlement on the Connecticut River carries the name of an Englishman who never saw it, chosen by a royal governor a few years before the Revolution would end royal governors in Massachusetts for good.
Clay, Water, and the Mills
The red clay along Whately’s brooks was rich in iron, and it supported a run of potteries: twenty-one potters worked here between 1778 and 1861, turning out redware for the valley. The same brooks that watered the crops turned mills, and Whately had them in numbers, grist mills and sawmills and woolen mills and furniture mills, along with what local history records as the state’s first gin distillery. Water and clay were the town’s first industries, and you can still read the shape of them in where the old roads and mill sites sit.
Winter Brooms
From the 1820s to the 1870s broom making was one of Whately’s major industries, and it fit the rhythm of a farm town. Most farms tied brooms at home through the winter, when the fields were done, so a household’s cash crop in the cold months was a stack of finished brooms rather than anything growing. It is a good picture of how a nineteenth-century New England town actually made its living: not one trade, but a farm that changed its work with the season.
The Tobacco Town
Since the mid-1800s tobacco has been a cash crop in Whately, and the town holds an unusual distinction: it is one of the few places outside Indonesia where high-quality Sumatra tobacco will grow. The broad floodplain soil of the Connecticut River valley made this one of the great tobacco regions of the country, and the long curing sheds are still part of the landscape. Whately spreads across about 20.7 square miles, rising to Mount Esther at 980 feet, bordered by Conway, Deerfield, Sunderland, Hatfield and Williamsburg, with the Connecticut River on the east and the Mill River through the middle.
Sources: the Town of Whately History page, adapted from the Massachusetts DCR Whately Reconnaissance Report (June 2009); the Town of Whately About page; U.S. Census Bureau.