Northampton: Jonathan Edwards, Sojourner Truth, and the First Women's Basketball Game
Near Springfield, Massachusetts
Northampton, Massachusetts, sitting in the broad Pioneer Valley where the Connecticut River bends west, has a habit of turning up at unexpected moments in American history.
In the winter of seventeen thirty-four and seventeen thirty-five, the Congregationalist minister Jonathan Edwards began preaching sermons in Northampton that triggered something unprecedented: a wave of conversions and spiritual intensity that spread up and down the Connecticut River valley, reaching three hundred of his own congregants and dozens of surrounding towns in a matter of months. His account of it, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, circulated in England and the American colonies, inspiring George Whitefield and helping ignite the broader movement historians call the First Great Awakening. The Protestant evangelical tradition in America traces a direct line back to that revival in Northampton.
More than a century later, in eighteen forty-four, Sojourner Truth arrived in the Florence neighborhood of Northampton to join a utopian community called the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, one of the few interracial, egalitarian communities in antebellum America. She stayed for several years, refining the antislavery arguments she would carry across the country. Several homes in Florence were stations on the Underground Railroad.
Smith College, founded here in eighteen seventy-one as a college for women, added another chapter in eighteen ninety-three. Physical education instructor Senda Berenson had introduced basketball to her students the year before, adapting James Naismith's still-new rules to emphasize teamwork over individual play. On March twenty-second, eighteen ninety-three, two Smith class teams played the first women's college basketball game ever recorded. The sophomore class beat the freshmen five to four, in two fifteen-minute halves.
Calvin Coolidge read law in Northampton, served as its mayor, and eventually reached the White House. Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, performed here in eighteen fifty-one and declared it the Paradise of America.
The town has worn that nickname comfortably ever since.
