Northfield is the northernmost town of the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts, a Franklin County town of about 2,900 split by the Connecticut River, with Vermont (Vernon) and New Hampshire (Hinsdale, Winchester) immediately across the line to the north. It is one of the older settlements in the Valley, claimed in 1673 and incorporated as a town in 1723. Most of the town’s history and most of its visible village fabric sit in East Northfield, on the long flat ridge along the river’s east bank, where Main Street runs more or less north–south for a couple of miles past white-clapboard houses, the country store pictured above, and a few churches and inns. West Northfield, across the river, is a much smaller settlement of working farms and rural lots.
Dwight L. Moody and the Northfield schools
Northfield is best known as the birthplace of the 19th-century American evangelist Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899), and as the home of the schools he founded in his hometown later in life.
Moody was born in East Northfield on February 5, 1837, the sixth of nine children. He spent his early career as a Boston shoe salesman and a Chicago lay preacher, became internationally famous on 1870s revival tours of Britain and the United States with the singer Ira D. Sankey, and used the proceeds and fundraising of those tours to start two schools in his home landscape:
- The Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies in 1879, on the East Northfield side, for daughters of families that could not afford private secondary schooling.
- The Mount Hermon School for Boys in 1881, in neighboring Gill across the river, on the same model.
The two schools merged in 1971 as the Northfield Mount Hermon School. The combined school consolidated all instruction onto the Mount Hermon (Gill) campus in 2005, and Thomas Aquinas College opened a satellite campus on the former Northfield property in 2019. The buildings of the East Northfield campus (academic halls, dormitories, the chapel) are still in active use under the new institution; many predate the merger and several are on the National Register.
A Moody-era summer-conference legacy still runs in town: the Northfield Conference evangelical gathering, held annually on the East Northfield grounds for a century, drew thousands of visitors and shaped the town’s mid-20th-century character as a religious-resort destination.
Northfield Mountain
The Northfield Mountain Recreation and Environmental Center on Route 63 in the south part of town is operated by FirstLight Power around the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Project, a 1972 hydroelectric facility that pumps water from the Connecticut River up to a 300-acre mountaintop reservoir 800 feet above the river during low-demand hours, then runs it back through underground turbines at peak demand. It was the largest pumped- storage facility in the world when it opened. The recreation center on the lower slopes is open to the public and runs many miles of multi-use trails for hiking, mountain biking, and cross-country skiing.
Schell Bridge
The Schell Memorial Bridge is the closed historic Pennsylvania-truss bridge spanning the Connecticut River between East and West Northfield. It was donated to the town in 1903 by Francis R. Schell, a wealthy Northfield native who paid the $42,000 construction cost so he could reach the East Northfield railroad station from his property; the design is a 515-foot steel cantilever truss with Gothic Revival decorative metalwork. The bridge was barricaded in 1985 due to corrosion of the steel members and has been closed ever since, but a Friends of the Schell Bridge effort and a Smith College engineering study have kept ongoing rehabilitation plans alive; at the time of writing the rehab is funded but not yet built.
Sources
- Town of Northfield
- Northfield, Massachusetts — Wikipedia (2020 U.S. Census population: 2,866)
- Northfield Mount Hermon — official site
- Schell Bridge — Wikipedia