Middlefield is a small Hampshire County hill town of about 385 in the high country right at the Berkshire County line, sitting at roughly 1,677 feet above sea level, among the highest town centers in Massachusetts. The town was first settled in 1780 and incorporated in 1783 from parts of Chester, Becket, Worthington, and the old town of Partridgefield (now Peru and Hinsdale). Most of Middlefield outside the small village clusters is woods, hill farms, and the upland watersheds feeding the Westfield River system.
Glendale Falls
The town’s most distinctive natural feature is Glendale Falls, a long cascading waterfall on Glendale Brook in the southeast part of town. The Trustees of Reservations, which has owned the Glendale Falls Reservation since 1964, describes the falls as “one of the longest and most powerful waterfall runs in Massachusetts,” fed by more than five square miles of upland watershed and dropping dramatically toward the Westfield River below. A short trail from a small dirt parking area off Clark Wright Road follows the brook down past a long succession of ledges and pools, and the stone foundation of an 18th-century grist mill (built by the Revolutionary-era Glendale Farm) still survives on the north bank near the top of the falls.
The Middlefield Fair
The Middlefield Fair, run by the Highland Agricultural Society, has been held annually in August since 1855 and is one of the smallest and oldest of the surviving Massachusetts hill-country agricultural fairs. The three-day fair runs to ox-pulls and horse-pulls, livestock and 4-H exhibits, pie-eating contests, and the kind of small-town country fair that has not changed all that much since the 19th century. The fairgrounds sit a short distance south of Middlefield Center on Bell Road.
Geography and the river
Middlefield is unusual among Hampshire County towns in that it borders only one other Hampshire County town, Worthington, to the northeast. Its other neighbors are all in Berkshire County (Peru to the north, Washington to the west, and Becket to the southwest) and in Hampden County (Chester to the south and southeast). The West Branch of the Westfield River runs along the long Middlefield/Becket town line on its way down to Chester, and the upper Westfield system through Middlefield is part of the federally-designated Westfield Wild and Scenic River, the first such designation in Massachusetts.
Other notes
- Middlefield’s population peaked at around 750 in the mid-19th century and has been a small rural farming and second-home town ever since; the 2020 census count of 385 is roughly half of that 19th-century peak.
- Notable Middlefielders include the geologist Ebenezer Emmons (born here in 1799), and the Revolutionary War post rider Israel Bissell, who is buried in the town cemetery.
- The original 1841 alignment of the Western Railroad through the West Branch Westfield gorge (now the Keystone Arches Trail) climbs out of Chester and crosses into the southeast corner of Middlefield over the surviving 1840s dry-laid granite arch bridges.