Blandford: New Glasgow in the Berkshire Hills
Near Springfield, Massachusetts
The first settler arrived at this Berkshire hilltown in the fall of seventeen thirty-five: a Scots-Irish man named Hugh Black who came from Hopkinton looking for land and the freedom to practice Presbyterian faith without interference. More families from the same community followed, and they called their new home New Glasgow, after the Scottish city they remembered.
When Massachusetts incorporated the town in seventeen forty-one, Governor William Shirley changed the name to Blandford after the ship that had carried him from England. The Scots-Irish settlers kept farming the thin, rocky soil at elevations reaching seventeen hundred feet, in a climate cooler than the Connecticut River valley below.
The hilltowns of western Massachusetts filled in about seventy-five years after the lowlands, and Blandford sits right along the ridge that drivers cross today on the Massachusetts Turnpike heading toward the Berkshires.
