Palmer, Town of Seven Railroads
Near Springfield, Massachusetts
The town you're passing through was once called the Town of Seven Railroads. Palmer sits where the Ware, Quaboag, and Swift Rivers meet to form the Chicopee, a geography that attracted Scottish-Irish settlers in seventeen twenty-seven and textile mills not long after. Its real golden age came with the railroad.
By the mid-eighteen hundreds, Palmer was a major transfer junction where north-south and east-west lines crossed, and Depot Village could count five rail lines and two stagecoach routes. An eighteen eighty-five Boston and Albany timetable listed it as one of only seven express stops across the two hundred miles between Boston and Albany. The railroads have mostly gone quiet, but Palmer still carries I-Ninety across that same river crossroads the settlers found three centuries ago.
