Place:Hadley, Hampshire, Massachusetts, United States

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NameHadley
TypeTown
Coordinates42.333°N 72.583°W
Located inHampshire, Massachusetts, United States
Contained Places
Cemetery
Hockanum Cemetery
Main Street Cemetery ( - 1670 )
Old Hadley Cemetery ( 1660 - )
West Cemetery ( - 1759 )
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
source: Family History Library Catalog


the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Hadley is a town in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 5,325 at the 2020 census. It is part of the Springfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area. The area around the Hampshire and Mountain Farms Malls along Route 9 is a major shopping destination for the surrounding communities.

Contents

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Early

Hadley was first settled in 1659 and was officially incorporated in 1661. The former Norwottuck was renamed for Hadleigh, Suffolk. Its settlers were primarily a discontented group of families from the Puritan colonies of Hartford and Wethersfield, Connecticut, who petitioned to start a new colony up north after some controversy over doctrine in the local church. The settlement was led by John Russell. The first settler inside of Hadley was Nathaniel Dickinson, who surveyed the streets of what is now Hadley, Hatfield, and Amherst. At the time, Hadley encompassed a wide radius of land on both sides of the Connecticut River (but mostly on the eastern shore) including much of what would become known as the Equivalent Lands. In the following century, these were broken off into precincts and eventually the separate towns of Hatfield, Amherst, South Hadley, Granby and Belchertown. The early histories of these towns are, as a result, filed under the history of Hadley.

Lt. Gen. Edward Whalley and Maj. Gen. William Goffe, two Puritan generals hunted for their role in the execution (or "regicide") of Charles I of England, were hidden in the home of the town's minister, John Russell. During King Philip's War, an attack by Native Americans was, by some accounts, thwarted with the aid of General Goffe. This event, compounded by the reluctance of the townsfolk to betray Goffe's location, developed into the legend of the Angel of Hadley, which came to be included in the historical manuscript History of Hadley by Sylvester Judd.

In 1683, eleven years before the Salem witch trials, Mary Webster, wife to William Webster son of the former governor of Connecticut and a founder of the very town of Hadley (John Webster), was accused and acquitted of witchcraft. She was unsuccessfully hanged by rowdy town folk. A description is given in Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana.

The Civil War general Joseph Hooker was a longtime resident of Hadley. Levi Stockbridge, one of the founders of the Massachusetts Agricultural College (now the University of Massachusetts Amherst), was also from Hadley where he was a farmer.

Recent

Hadley's transformation from an old agricultural order to the new form is the direct result of expansion of the nearby University of Massachusetts Amherst during the 1960s. Much of its former farmland was swallowed in the housing market stimulated by incoming faculty and off-campus students. Route 116 was redirected in an attempt to solve traffic congestion. Route 9, which runs east–west through the town to connect Amherst and Northampton, became a hotpoint for commercial development due to Amherst not wanting development on its land, and large corporations such as Stop & Shop and McDonald's opened stores along the strip. Today, the Hadley economy is a mixture of agriculture and commercial development, including big-box stores and the Hampshire Mall. Current big-box retail includes a Wal-Mart, a Target, a Home Depot, and a Lowe's, plus more than a dozen other stores.

In 2003, an organization called Hadley Neighbors for Sensible Development was formed that opposed continued large-scale commercial development in Hadley by emphasizing the downside of such growth. However, many local residents support commercial development, and about 1,000 people signed a petition asking for a new Wal-Mart, saying it would save them money on their groceries. In 2008, Wal-Mart pulled its plans to build the Supercenter after the Conservation Commission ruled that the plan did not comply with wetlands regulations. The developer of the site (Hampshire Mall) filed and lost numerous appeals but continued its legal challenges of the commission's findings. Many residents also opposed rezoning to accommodate a new Lowe's store because they said it would be too big and would require more filling of wetlands than allowed by state law. However, the rezoning passed in 2004 and the store was built in 2009. Lowe's then sued the town because it didn't want to pay the required sewer hookup fees. And, in 2010, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection found that Lowe's had illegally filled large areas of wetlands on that site and fined the developer more than $15,000.

The World Monuments Fund listed the "Cultural Landscape of Hadley, Massachusetts" on the 2010 World Monuments Watch List of Most Endangered Sites.


The landscape of Hadley is largely open-field farming, which was only used in the earliest New England settlements and had mostly disappeared by the 18th century; its survival in Hadley on such a large scale is unusual. According to the World Monument Fund are zoned for residential and commercial use, providing no long-term protection for the historic landscape.

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