Leverett is a small Franklin County hill town of about 1,900 in the wooded uplands east of the Connecticut River, between Mount Toby on the west and the Shutesbury line on the east. It was set off from Sunderland and incorporated in 1774, and is named for William Leverett, a colonial-era Boston figure related to the Leverett family of governors. The town has no real village center in the conventional sense. Instead, a string of small clusters (Leverett Center, North Leverett, East Leverett, Moore’s Corner) connect by winding back roads through the woods.
The New England Peace Pagoda
The most-visited place in Leverett is also the most unexpected: the New England Peace Pagoda, a 100-foot white Buddhist stupa on a hilltop in the north end of town. It was built in the mid-1980s by the Nipponzan Myōhōji order, a Japanese Nichiren Buddhist monastic group founded in 1917 by Nichidatsu Fujii, who began building peace pagodas worldwide after the 1945 atomic bombings. The Leverett pagoda was the first Nipponzan Myōhōji peace pagoda built in North America, and is one of dozens the order has constructed around the world.
The grounds include the white stupa itself, with golden Buddha statues set into alcoves facing the four cardinal directions, a reflecting pond, a meditation temple (the original wooden temple burned in 1987; the current temple was inaugurated in 2011), and a network of paths through the hilltop woods. The site is open to the public, free, and is treated as an active religious site rather than a tourist attraction. Visitors are asked to walk quietly and to remove shoes before entering the temple.
Rattlesnake Gutter
Near the geographic center of town is Rattlesnake Gutter, a narrow boulder-filled chasm cut into the hills, with steep walls of broken talus and a rough dirt road running along its floor. It is town conservation land and one of the better-known walking destinations in this part of Franklin County. Glacial origin theories vary (meltwater spillway, ice-stagnation channel), but the present-day effect is a striking landscape feature wildly out of proportion to anything else in the immediate terrain.
Leverett Pond and the village clusters
Leverett Pond, in the south-central part of town, is the town’s largest body of water and the visible center of Leverett Center, which has a few public buildings, the town offices, and the Leverett Library (rebuilt in the 2010s as a modern, energy-efficient building widely admired locally for its design). North Leverett sits along the Sawmill River in the north of town and includes the historic North Leverett Baptist Church and the small mill remnants along the river. Moore’s Corner, north of Leverett Center, and East Leverett, near the Shutesbury line, are the other named clusters. There is no commercial center; for groceries and gas, residents drive to Amherst or Sunderland.
Today
Leverett has long been a town of writers, academics, and quiet eccentrics. Its proximity to Amherst and the Five Colleges has steadily pulled in a population that values being half an hour from a university and three minutes from a hiking trail. The town has very limited commerce, no through-route highway (Routes 47 and 63 only nip the western edge), and a strong land-conservation ethic. The boundary towns are Sunderland on the west, Montague on the northwest, Wendell to the northeast, Shutesbury to the east, and Amherst to the south.
Sources
- Town of Leverett
- Leverett, Massachusetts — Wikipedia (2020 U.S. Census population: 1,865)
- New England Peace Pagoda — Wikipedia
- Nipponzan-Myōhōji — Wikipedia