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This tour has opened in a new window, to return to the map close this window. Turners Falls Page 1 of 4 Turners Falls
History and Culture
The largest of five villages, Turners Falls was named after Captain William Turner, who played a key role in the region's Indian Wars. In 1676, during King Phillips War, Captain Turner led a group of about 160 mounted soldiers from Hadley and made a surprise attack on an Indian encampment located near the falls. The attack on a sleeping village of native Americans on the Gill side of the Great Falls lasted several hours and resulted in the tragic deaths of many innocent people including many women and children. The area by the falls was traditionally shared by the Pocumtuck Confederacy, the Narragansetts, the Nipmucs, the Wampanoag, and the Wabanaki tribes because of the abundance of salmon and shad available there. In recognition of the tragic nature of the massacre, the Board of Selectmen and Town of Montague, as part of its 250th anniversary, joined with representatives of various Native American tribes on May 19, 2004 in a Reconciliation Day ceremony.
Turners Falls was founded in 1868 as a planned industrial community according to the plan of Alvah Crocker, a prominent man from Fitchburg who envisioned in the immense, power of the waterfalls the means of establishing a great city. Crocker was influenced by other, earlier and successful experiments in Lowell and elsewhere. Crocker's vision for Turners Falls was to attract industry to the town by offering cheap hydropower that was made possible by the harnessing of the Connecticut River, through the construction of a dam and canal. His development concept was to sell mill sites along the power canal to these companies and to sell individual building lots to mill workers who would come to work in the mills. The rest of the village was laid out in a horizontal grid pattern with the main avenues labeled alphabetically and the cross streets numerically. Avenue A, the main commercial district was designed as a grand 100 foot wide, tree lined avenue. Although Turners Falls never quite experienced the scale of development initially envisioned by Crocker, the village did grow significantly, and prospered well into the twentieth century. The importance of hydropower to this development was apparent in one industrial promotion, prepared by the Turners Falls Board of Trade, which referred to Turners Falls as the home of the white coal. During the period 1868 - 1897, several mills were attracted to the cheap power available at Turners Falls. The most notable among them was the John Russell Cutlery Company (1868), then the largest cutlery company in America. Best known for its production of the ?Bowie Knife? which achieved notoriety on the American frontier, the Cutlery employed 1,200 people at its height. Other industries that figured prominently in the early development of Turners Falls were the Montague Paper (1871), Keith Paper (1871), Turners Falls Paper (1897) and Marshall Paper (1895), the Turners Falls Cotton Mill (1874) and Turners Falls Power Company (1885), the forerunner of Western Massachusetts Electric Company and Northeast Utilities. This development was fueled by a flood of immigrants, primarily Irish, French Canadian, Polish and German. Turners Falls Page 1 of 4 close window
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