Edward Bellamy House: Looking Backward
Near Springfield, Massachusetts
This modest Greek Revival house on Church Street in Chicopee Falls is the only National Historic Landmark in Chicopee. It was the lifelong home of Edward Bellamy, a journalist and visionary writer born here in eighteen fifty. In eighteen eighty-eight Bellamy published a novel called Looking Backward, in which a Boston man falls asleep in the eighteen eighties and wakes up in the year two thousand to find America transformed into a cooperative utopia where wealth is shared equally and poverty has been abolished.
The book sold more than two hundred thousand copies within its first year and inspired hundreds of Bellamy Clubs across the country, fueling early labor and socialist movements. Tolstoy read it. Dewey called it one of the most influential books of his lifetime.
Bellamy died in eighteen ninety-eight at forty-eight, never leaving western Massachusetts. His house has been a small museum since the nineteen seventies.
