William Pynchon, the Heretic Who Founded Springfield

William Pynchon arrived at the bend in the Connecticut River in sixteen thirty-six with a small party of settlers and a head full of Puritan doctrine, which he would later decide was wrong. He purchased land from the Agawam people, paying in hoes, wampum, coats, hatchets, and knives, eighteen of each, and named the settlement Agawam Plantation. Four years later it was renamed Springfield after his home village in England.

Pynchon had selected the location carefully: it sat at the point where the Connecticut River's Enfield Falls forced all river travelers to stop and transfer their cargo. He built a trading post and turned the geographical chokepoint into a personal fortune, exporting between four thousand and six thousand beaver pelts per year through the sixteen forties. Then he wrote a book.

The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, published in London in sixteen fifty, argued against the core Calvinist doctrine that Christ's suffering was the price of human atonement. Pynchon believed obedience, not punishment, was what mattered. When the book reached Boston, it was burned on the Common, one of the first books banned in the New World, before any colony had passed a formal censorship law.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony accused Pynchon of heresy and demanded he recant. He did not recant. Instead he quietly transferred his Springfield landholdings to his son John and sailed back to England in sixteen fifty-two, where he spent the rest of his life writing theological arguments nobody in Massachusetts was required to read.

The city he built on a river bend outlasted the controversy. The name Pynchon is still on the street maps.