Blandford is a small Hampden County hill town of about 1,200 in the eastern Berkshire foothills, high above the Westfield River valley well west of Westfield. The town was first settled in the 1730s, mainly by Scots-Irish families, and was incorporated in 1741. The settlers had hoped to call the new town New Glasgow, but Massachusetts governor William Shirley overrode them and named it Blandford, reportedly after the ship that had brought him from England. Most of the town outside the small village center is woods, hill farms, and upland brooks draining into the Westfield River system, with the southwestern corner draining instead via Otis Reservoir to the Farmington River.
The Blandford Fair
The Blandford Fair, held on the fairgrounds in town every Labor Day weekend, is one of the oldest continuously running agricultural fairs in Massachusetts. The fair’s organizers count their late-1860s beginnings and ran the 156th edition in 2025. It is a classic small New England country fair: ox-pulls and horse-pulls, livestock and 4-H exhibits, harness racing on the half-mile track, a midway, demolition derby, and the customary deep-fried fair food. For Blandford and the surrounding hill towns, it is by a wide margin the largest event of the year.
Blandford Ski Area
For most of the 20th century Blandford was also a small skiing town. The Blandford Ski Area opened in 1936 and was owned and operated by the Springfield Ski Club until 2017. By the end of that run, it was the longest continuously operating club-owned ski area in North America. The area was sold to the operators of Ski Butternut in 2017 and reopened as Ski Blandford for the 2018–2019 and 2019–2020 seasons before closing permanently in 2020. The lifts, base lodge, and trails on the hillside off North Street are still visible, but the area is no longer in operation.
The Henry Knox Trail
In the winter of 1775–1776, Colonel Henry Knox hauled the captured cannon of Fort Ticonderoga across Massachusetts to the siege of Boston, and his route, the Knox Trail, passed through Blandford as it climbed out of the Westfield valley and over the Berkshires. A 1920s state-erected granite Knox Trail marker stands along the old road in town, one of a chain of such markers placed across the route from upstate New York to Westfield and on toward Boston.
Geography and the Turnpike
The Massachusetts Turnpike (Interstate 90) crosses Blandford east-to-west but has no exit in town; the Blandford Service Plaza, on the eastbound side of the Pike in the western part of town, is the rest area most travelers know the name “Blandford” from. The town center, on Main Street roughly two miles north of the Pike, sits at well over 1,400 feet of elevation, among the highest village centers in Hampden County. Blandford borders Chester to the north, Russell to the east, Granville to the south, Tolland to the southwest, and Otis and Becket (across the Berkshire County line) to the west.
Sources
- Town of Blandford
- Blandford, Massachusetts — Wikipedia (2020 U.S. Census population: 1,215)
- The Blandford Fair
- Blandford Ski Area — Wikipedia
- Henry Knox — Noble train of artillery — Wikipedia