Leyden is a very small Franklin County hill town of about 730, set on the Vermont state line in the far northwest corner of the Pioneer Valley region. The town was set off from Bernardston in 1784 and formally incorporated as a separate town on February 22, 1809. It was named for the city of Leiden in the Netherlands, in honor of the Pilgrims’ refuge there before they sailed for America. Leyden is bounded by Guilford, Vermont to the north; Bernardston to the east; Greenfield to the south; and Colrain to the west.
A very quiet town
Leyden is one of the smallest and least-trafficked towns in Franklin County. It is one of only a handful of Massachusetts towns with no numbered state routes running through it, a distinction otherwise mostly held by towns on Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and the Elizabeth Islands. There is no village strip, no traffic light, and no supermarket; the civic center of town consists of the small white-clapboard Leyden Town Hall pictured above, the First Congregational Church of Leyden across the road, and the town common between them. Police service is provided by the neighboring Bernardston Police Department, and the nearest hospital, bus, and passenger rail are all in Greenfield.
Land and water
The town sits along the eastern edge of the Berkshire foothills and is largely forested, with farmsteads scattered along the hilltops and the valleys of the Green River (which forms much of the town’s western boundary with Colrain) and the branches of Glen Brook. Where the main and east branches of Glen Brook meet, the brook is dammed to form the Greenfield Reservoir, which supplies drinking water to the city of Greenfield to the south; the reservoir then drains southward as Glen Brook into the Green River. A small state forest and a wildlife management area lie within town boundaries.
Maple sugar and old utopias
Leyden’s small economy today is built around hill agriculture, woodlot forestry, and, most visibly each March, maple sugar production, with sugarhouses scattered along the back roads. The town has an unusually colorful history of small religious and communal experiments for a place its size: the Dorrellites, a short-lived utopian sect led by William Dorrell, were active here in the 1790s, and the Brotherhood of the Spirit commune was founded in Leyden in 1968. A more conventional through-line is the steady run of small grist mills, wood-product mills, and dairy farms that supported the town through the 18th and 19th centuries before most of those industries faded. Travelers heading north out of Greenfield on Leyden Road climb out of the Green River valley into the town’s quiet hill country.
Sources
- Town of Leyden
- Leyden, Massachusetts — Wikipedia (2020 U.S. Census population: 734; set off from Bernardston in 1784, incorporated February 22, 1809; named for Leiden in the Netherlands)
- Greenfield Reservoir / Glen Brook — Wikipedia