Montague is a town of about 8,500 in southern Franklin County, set against the east bank of the Connecticut River where the river makes its sharp bend at the Great Falls. The town is unusual in being a single municipality made up of five distinct villages (none of them quite the “town center”) separated by a few miles of farmland and forest. Montague was settled from Sunderland in 1715 and incorporated in 1754.
The five villages
- Turners Falls is the largest village, set on the river around the dam and the power canal. Most of the town’s population and its main commercial district are here. Avenue A, the pictured street, is the village’s National Register-listed main thoroughfare.
- Montague Center is the original colonial settlement, two miles south of Turners Falls. A small village green with a Greek Revival town hall, a white-clapboard church, and a few 19th-century houses around it.
- Millers Falls, in the northeast corner, sits on the Millers River at the boundary with Erving (and is shared between the two towns).
- Lake Pleasant is the Spiritualist summer village in the southeast. See below.
- Montague City is the small village at the south end where the Connecticut and Deerfield rivers meet.
Turners Falls and the power canal
In the late 1860s, the Turners Falls Company dammed the Connecticut at the Great Falls and built a power canal (about 2.7 miles long, 125 feet wide) along the east bank to feed mills with controlled flow. The result was a planned 19th-century industrial village, Turners Falls, laid out on a regular grid east of the canal, with brick commercial blocks along Avenue A and rows of brick worker housing along the cross streets. Unlike most New England mill towns, which grew up incrementally, Turners Falls was largely designed and built as a single project; the village fabric still reads that way.
The mills produced cutlery, paper, cotton, and (later) wood products. The hydropower complex is still active under FirstLight Power: the diversion dam, the canal, Station No. 1 at the head, and Cabot Station at the south end of the canal. The canalside is now publicly walkable.
Great Falls Discovery Center
The Great Falls Discovery Center at 2 Avenue A, in a former paper mill at the head of the canal, is the public-facing interpretive site for the Connecticut River watershed as a whole, with exhibits on the river’s geology, ecology, and history along all 410 miles from the Canadian border to Long Island Sound, run jointly by Mass DCR and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Free, generally Tuesday through Sunday. The 3.7-mile Canalside Rail Trail runs from here south along the canal to East Deerfield, threading through Connecticut River Greenway parcels.
Lake Pleasant
The southeastern village of Lake Pleasant has an unusual history: it was founded in 1870 as a campground and quickly became the seat of the New England Spiritualist Campmeeting Association (incorporated 1879). At its peak around 1900 it had nearly 200 cottages and drew 2,000 summer residents for séances, lectures, and hotel-resort entertainment. A 1907 fire destroyed much of the village, and the lake’s later use as a public water supply ended recreational use, but the National Spiritual Alliance still owns property here and the village claims to be the oldest continuously-operating Spiritualist community in the United States. The cottage rows, the bandstand site, and the camp-meeting grounds are still recognizable.
Reading and an old paper mill
Just south of Turners Falls, in Montague Center, the Montague Bookmill occupies the 1830s Alvah Stone Mill (a former grist mill) on the Sawmill River, with used books on three floors, plus a cafe, a restaurant, and a music room, under the long-running tagline “Books you don’t need in a place you can’t find.” It is the town’s most-visited destination after the Discovery Center.
The town’s name
The village of Turners Falls is named for Captain William Turner, who led a colonial militia attack on a Native fishing camp at the falls (known to its inhabitants as Peskeompscut) on May 19, 1676, during King Philip’s War. The attack killed between 100 and 200 people, mostly women and children, and is treated by modern historians as a massacre. The Discovery Center addresses this history in its interpretive material and works with the descendant community at the Nolumbeka Project on a more honest framing of the site than the older “Battle of Turner’s Falls” name implied.
Sources
- Town of Montague
- Montague, Massachusetts — Wikipedia (2020 U.S. Census population: 8,580)
- Great Falls Discovery Center
- Battle of Turner’s Falls — Wikipedia