South Hadley, Massachusetts

South Hadley, Massachusetts is best known as the home of Mount Holyoke College, founded in eighteen thirty-seven by Mary Lyon as one of the first institutions of higher education for women in the United States. Lyon spent years fundraising town by town across New England, insisting that women deserved rigorous academic training at a time when most educators assumed otherwise. The college she built opened with eighty students and a curriculum as demanding as any men's college of the era.

South Hadley itself had been incorporated in seventeen seventy-five, a quiet farming town on the Connecticut River where an early canal, built in seventeen ninety-five, allowed boats to bypass a falls. That canal was one of the first in the country. The town eventually traded its industrial canal heritage for the quieter but lasting identity it holds today, as the village surrounding one of the most historically significant women's colleges in the world.