Hadley, Massachusetts
N 42° 20.345 W 072° 36.741
18T E 696691 N 4690186
The town of Hadley is located in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, USA. The posted coordinates are for the Welcome to Hadley sign located on the north side of Route 9 on the west side of town.
Waymark Code: WMA27A
Location: Massachusetts, United States
Date Posted: 11/04/2010
Views: 4
"Hadley is a town in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 4,793 at the 2000 census. It is part of the Springfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area.
History
Early
Hadley was first settled in 1659 and was officially incorporated in 1661. Its settlers were primarily a discontented group of families from the puritan colonies of Hartford and Wethersfield, Connecticut, who petitioned to start a new colony up north after some controversy over doctrine in the local church. At the time, Hadley encompassed a wide radius of land on both sides of the Connecticut River, but mostly on the eastern shore. In the following century, these were broken off into precincts and eventually the separate towns of Hatfield, Amherst, South Hadley, Granby and Belchertown. The early histories of these towns are, as a result, filed under the history of Hadley.
Edward Whalley and General William Goffe, two Puritan generals hunted for their role in the execution (or "regicide") of Charles I of England, were hidden in the home of the town's minister, John Russell. During King Philip's War, an attack by Native Americans was, by some accounts, thwarted with the aid of General Goffe. This event, compounded by the reluctance of the townsfolk to betray Goffe's location, developed into the legend of the Angel of Hadley, which came to be included in the historical manuscript "History of Hadley" by Sylvester Judd.
In 1683, eleven years before the Salem Witch Trials, Molly Webster was accused and acquitted of witchcraft charges. She was unsuccessfully hanged by rowdy town folk. A description is given in Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana.
The Civil War general Joseph Hooker was a longtime resident of Hadley. Levi Stockbridge, founder of the Massachusetts Agricultural College (now University of Massachusetts, Amherst), was also from Hadley where he was a farmer.
Recent
Hadley's transformation from an old agricultural order to the new form is the direct result of expansion of the nearby University of Massachusetts Amherst during the 1960s. Much of its former farmland was swallowed in the housing market stimulated by incoming faculty and off-campus students. Route 116 was redirected in an attempt to solve traffic congestion. Route 9, which runs east-west through the town to connect Amherst and Northampton, became a hotpoint for commercial development, and large corporations such as Stop & Shop and McDonald's opened stores along the strip. Today, the Hadley economy is a mixture of agriculture and commercial development, including big-box stores and the Hampshire Mall."
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