Originally settled and inhabited by the Pocomtuc tribe, the area was site of the village of Squawkeag. Northfield was first colonized in 1673 by the English and was officially incorporated in 1723.
The territory was successfully defended a number of times by Native Americans. As a result, the English colonists were occasionally taken north to Quebec, held as hostages by the French, causing the town to revert to American Indian control a few times.[1]
Eventually, conflicts with the Native American population ceased after most of the native population was displaced and/or sold into slavery as a result of King Philip's War and after a series of massacres of local Indian villages.[2]
Much of Northfield's development in the late nineteenth century was spurred by the work of evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody, a native of Northfield who established the Northfield Seminary for Girls in 1879 on a sweeping hillside in East Northfield. The school was the site of Moody's religious conferences, which attracted thousands of visitors to Northfield each summer. The influx of visitors led to the development of the town as a summer resort, especially after the opening of the Northfield Hotel in 1887. Francis Schell, a New York capitalist attracted by his interest in Moody's work at the Northfield Seminary, commissioned architect Bruce Price to design a summer home, which became known as the Northfield Chateau. Patterned after a French château but fanciful in style with prominent turrets and 99 rooms, the house fell into a state of disrepair following Schell's death, and it was demolished in 1967.
The Vermont and Massachusetts Railroad had established rail service to Northfield by 1850, along a line running from Millers Falls, Massachusetts to Brattleboro, Vermont. Even though the railway crossed the Connecticut River in Northfield, East Northfield Station was actually located in West Northfield, necessitating that travelers had to travel back across the Connecticut River on the lower deck of the rail bridge. To provide for safer and more convenient access across the river, Francis Schell gave $60,000 for the construction of a new steel bridge. The Schell Bridge is a Pennsylvania truss structure of impressive design, which crosses the river in one span of 515 ft (157 m).
In 1971 the Northfield Mount Hermon School was formed by the merger of the Northfield Seminary and the Mount Hermon School for boys, which Moody had founded in 1881 in nearby Gill. The school continued to operate as one school with two campuses some 5 miles apart on opposite banks of the Connecticut River until 2005 when the school consolidated its operations on the Mount Hermon campus in Gill. The school still owns its former campus in Northfield, although it is actively looking to sell the property. Moody's birthplace and grave site, located on the Northfield campus, will not be sold and will be retained as a historic site. The Auditorium, used for Moody's religious conventions, and the school's original Romanesque Revival buildings remain extant on the Northfield campus.
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