Westfield: The Whip City

Westfield was settled in sixteen sixty as the westernmost outpost in the Massachusetts Colony, on land the Pocomtuc people called Woronoco, meaning the winding land. For a century and a half its farmers worked the river floodplain quietly. Then in the early eighteen hundreds someone figured out that leather and braided cord were more profitable than crops.

The buggy whip industry took off. Dozens of Westfield companies were soon cracking out whips by the thousands, and Westfield came to make most of the world's supply. At its peak the United States Whip Company alone was turning out thousands of whips a day.

Then the automobile arrived. Eventually the last Westfield manufacturers made their final whips. The city still carries the nickname it earned in the height of the horse-and-carriage age: the Whip City.