Windsor, Massachusetts
A Short History of Windsor
From a Berkshire hill grant named for a British general, to a town of mills and hill farms, to the Town Meeting that voted to build its own broadband network when no company would.
Gageborough
Windsor was founded on July 4, 1771, and it did not begin with the name it carries now. It was first called Gageborough, in honor of General Thomas Gage, then the British commander in North America. The land was rugged upland in the eastern Berkshires, settled by farming families who had climbed into the hills to make a living from thin soil, timber, and small water-powered mills.
The Name That Had to Change
The name did not survive the Revolution. When Gage turned his army against the colonists, a town named in his honor became an embarrassment, and the townspeople changed it to Windsor. The new name came from Windsor, Connecticut, where many of the settlers had emigrated from. It is worth sitting with: the town renamed itself in the same kind of meeting that still votes your budget today, because a room full of residents decided a British general no longer belonged over their door.
Hills, Mills, and Farms
For its first century Windsor grew the way upland Berkshire towns did, on logging, hill farming, and small mills powered by the brooks that feed the Westfield River. It was never a large place. By population Windsor ranks 22nd of the 32 cities and towns in Berkshire County and 329th of the 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts, which is exactly why the story of its broadband network matters as much as it does.
Notchview and the Protected Hills
Much of Windsor is open land held for the public. Notchview, a 3,100-acre reservation of the Trustees of Reservations, spreads across the high ground along Route 9 and draws hikers and cross-country skiers year round. The East Branch of the Westfield River runs about five miles through town, past the dammed swimming area at Windsor State Forest and the rocky waterfalls known as the Windsor Jambs. A town this small holding this much protected land is not an accident; it is the sum of many local decisions.
The Town That Wired Itself
The most recent chapter is one residents wrote themselves. When the cable companies decided Windsor held too few customers to bother wiring, the town built its own. Windsor put about $300,000 of its own savings into a $2.3 million fiber network, took on the debt, established a Municipal Light Plant under Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 164, joined the WiredWest cooperative of hilltowns, and lit the network up in 2020. In a town where the mills are long quiet, it is a reminder of what an open Town Meeting can still do: decide, on the strength of a vote, that the wire carrying your homework should belong to the people who use it.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor,_Massachusetts (with its own cited sources); Town of Windsor, windsormass.com.