About

Chesterfield: A Historical Sketch

Armed with royal land grants, the first settlers arrived in what is now Chesterfield in the early years of the 18th century and immediately set about the task of turning virgin wilderness into a prosperous farming community. By 1762, this community was sufficiently well established to be awarded formal documents of incorporation, although the boundary lines of the new town, which once contained portions of present-day Goshen, would not be finalized until 1793. In the intervening years, years during which some 200 men answered the colonial call to arms that would sever the nation's ties to Great Britain, Chesterfield continued to grow until, by 1790, the population stood at 1,183. By 1820, that count had risen to an all-time high of 1.447 before the country's second great wave of westward migration in 1830 initiated a drain that would sweep away 50 to 100 of the town's sons and daughters each decade until the end of the century. Tis migration was to prove more than just a population drain, however; it was to change Chesterfield's way of life forever.

The western pioneers, staking claim to vast acres of land with soil rich in untapped nutrients and free of the rocky outcroppings that have always made farming in New England so arduous, were soon flooding the markets of the eastern seaboard with many of the same kinds of crops produced by local farmers and at cheaper prices. By 1835, it was apparent that, if this region;s small towns were to survive the onslaught of competition from the frontier, they would have to diversify. Consequently, Chesterfield and other area communities saw an upsurge in trading and manufacturing activity that would continue until the end of the Civil War. Locally, that activity included the rise of several different types of milling operations as well as the manufacture of such items as wagons, button molds, tool handles, stove pipe, palm-leaf hats, grandfather clocks, and spools and bobbins for the silk mills of the lower valley. Most of these have long since passed into history, the victims of ever-increasing mechanization and competition from larger operations in the region's industrial core. As the local concerns shut down or moved away, Chesterfield settled into the backwater, its population finally declining to the point that, in 1950, there were only 496 people left in town, mostly dependent on jobs outside the community and a yearly influx of tourists and summer residents for their livelihood. 

Beginning with the back-to-the-land movement of the late1950's, the local population had been on the rise again, with minor fluctuations. But the town';s agricultural heritage is becoming more a memory every day as family farms and businesses that have survived for generations fade from the scene with distressing regularity. But there is hope of stemming this tide. Over the past several years, many residents have worked in a variety of ways to preserve Chesterfield's unique quality of life and the beauty of its natural setting to whatever extent appears consistent with its continued vitality in a changing world.

From: A Guide to Town Government in Chesterfield, Massachusetts, May 1992