Turners Falls: Massacre Site Becomes Mill Town

On May nineteenth, sixteen seventy-six, a colonial militia under Captain William Turner attacked a large encampment of Nipmuc and allied peoples fishing the Connecticut River falls here, killing one hundred to two hundred people, most of them women, children, and elders who had gathered for the spring salmon run. Turner himself was killed in the retreat. The site bore his name ever after.

Nearly two centuries later, an industrialist named Alvah Crocker looked at those same falls and saw water power on a grand scale. In eighteen sixty-eight he founded Turners Falls as a planned industrial city, laid out on a grid, and attracted the John Russell Cutlery Company, at the time the largest cutlery maker in America, best known for the Bowie knife. Paper mills and a power company followed. The village went from wilderness to factory town in a generation, its origins written in both grief and commerce.