Connecticut River Museum
THE "GREAT RIVER" OF NEW ENGLAND
THE CONNECTICUT RIVER
Excerpted from Edmund Delaney's The Connecticut River: New England's Historic Waterway. (Copyright, All Rights Reserved)
Massachusetts
The Connecticut River enters Massachusetts, bisecting it from north to south, with two-thirds of the state on its eastern side. The upper reaches of the river in Massachusetts are studded with an extraordinary conglomeration of educational institutions: Mount Holyoke College at South Hadley; Smith College and the Clark School for the Deaf (where Alexander Graham Bell was a teacher and board president) in Northampton; Amherst College, The University of Massachusetts, and Hampshire College in Amherst; and two community colleges in Holyoke and Greenfield. On the secondary level there are Williston Academy, Deerfield Academy, Northfield-Mount Hermon School, and Stoneleigh-Burnham.
As the river passes the historic town of Deerfield, it picks up the Deerfield River and then Millers River. It continues past the towns of Hatfield, Hadley, and Sunderland, which lie in the heart of the Massachusetts section of the river valley's tobacco belt. Tobacco and onions made these towns prosperous in Colonial days; more recently, plants and flowers, asparagus, apples, strawberries, and raspberries have become significant crops.
At South Hadley, the river is flanked on the east by Mount Holyoke (of 954 feet) and on the west by Mount Tom (1,214 feet). Between them is the Great Oxbow, the subject of a great many paintings. At this point the river passes dinosaur tracks in a quarry and more tracks just south of Mount Tom.
The river is not at its best in the southern half of the Massachusetts reach, as Hampden County is heavily industrialized in the Holyoke, Chicopee, and Springfield areas. And yet, Springfield has a number of firsts to its credit. It was here that Noah Webster's first dictionary was printed, and basketball and one version of the automobile were invented. At this point the volume of water coming from the upper river is considerably augmented by the confluence of the Westfield River flowing from the Berkshires and the Chicopee River from the east. The river widens to its greatest girth of 2,100 feet at Longmeadow.
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