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  • painting of a nightime scene with green hills, blue starry sky, and white clouds

    COVID-19 Stories

    Northampton and COVID-19 On this page, we will be sharing selections from the responses we have received. Some responses have been excerpted for length.Thank you to all who submitted such interesting stories, poetry and artwork. We have received several dozen,…

  • Four photographs of the aftermath of a devestating flood: ruins of buildings and other man-made structures.

    Mill River Flood of 1874

    The Mill River Flood ​150 Year Commemoration May 16, 1874 When the Williamsburg Reservoir Company set out to build a reservoir dam to increase their waterpower in 1864, one civil engineer quoted them a price of $100,000. Frustrated with that…

  • panoramic view of grassy meadows and mountain in the distance

    Native Histories in Nonotuck

    This place now known as Northampton is part of a larger region known to Indigenous (Native American) people as Nonotuck or Norwottuck.  Nonotuck homelands stretched across both sides of the Kwinitekw (now called the Connecticut River), including the present-day towns of Amherst, Hadley, Hatfield, South…

  • A silhouette of a woman imposed over an old document with handwritten script.

    Slavery in Northampton

    Historic Northampton’s Slavery Research Project From the founding of the English town of Northampton in 1654, until the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts in the 1780s, Northampton residents enslaved Africans, Native people, and people of African descent born in America.…

  • Wooden chest with decorative carvings and "Sara Strong" written across front

    The Sarah Strong Chest

    For master furniture maker Sharon Mehrman, making a 7/8 scale reproduction of Historic Northampton’s Sarah Strong Chest was a labor of love and forensics…