Cummington is a small Hampshire County hill town of about 830 in the Westfield River valley, west of Goshen and south of Ashfield. The town was settled in 1762 and incorporated in 1779, taking its name from Colonel John Cumings, an early proprietor. Route 9 runs along the river through the town center, and most of Cummington outside the village is woods, hill farms, and the upland watershed of the Westfield’s West Branch.
The Bryant Homestead
The hero image is the William Cullen Bryant Homestead, the farmhouse where the poet William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was raised. The house was built in 1783 by Bryant’s maternal grandfather, Ebenezer Snell, and Bryant lived there from about age four until he was 22. He left Cummington for a legal career and eventually for New York, where he became the long-time editor of the New York Evening Post and one of the most prominent American poets of the 19th century, best known for “Thanatopsis” (written when he was a teenager in Cummington) and “To a Waterfowl”. In adulthood he bought the farm back from his family and used it as a summer retreat for the rest of his life.
The homestead remained in the Bryant family until 1929, when his granddaughter donated it to The Trustees of Reservations, which still operates it. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962 and is open seasonally for tours, with the furnishings, library, and family artifacts substantially intact.
The Cummington Fair
The Cummington Fair, run by the Hillside Agricultural Society, has been held annually in late August since 1883 at the fairgrounds on Route 9 just west of the village. It is one of the surviving small-town agricultural fairs of the Massachusetts hill-country tradition: ox-pulls and horse-pulls, livestock and 4-H exhibits, a midway, a demolition derby, and the kind of deep-fried fair food that does not change much from one decade to the next. The fair is the town’s largest annual event by a wide margin.
The village and the Co-op
The village center sits along Route 9 at the Westfield River West Branch, with the Village Congregational Church, the small post office, and the town hall clustered within a short walk. The community anchor is the Old Creamery Co-op at 445 Berkshire Trail (Route 9), a member-owned cooperative grocery and cafe that occupies the former village creamery building and serves as a de facto community center for Cummington and the neighboring hill towns of Goshen, Ashfield, and Plainfield.
Other notes
- The mineral cummingtonite, a magnesium-iron amphibole, was first identified from a specimen found in Cummington in the early 19th century and is named for the town.
- The Westfield River through Cummington is part of the state’s first federally-designated Wild and Scenic River system (1993), recognizing the East, Middle, and West branches of the upper Westfield.
- The 1945 Office of War Information documentary The Cummington Story, with a score by Aaron Copland, was filmed in town and depicts the resettlement of European refugees in the community during World War II.