Thirty-eight rural towns – often called “hilltowns” – occupy the Highlands' 1,100 square miles. An exceedingly rural place, the Highlands region comprises nearly 14 percent of the Commonwealth's total landmass yet less than one percent of its population.
A long history of land conservation has permanently protected more than 25 percent of the land as open space. Colonial settlement patterns can be seen in the stone walls and meandering country roads that connect farms, forests, villages, and towns, while the area boasts some of the largest unbroken tracts of forestland in southern New England.
Observing the Highlands region as it rises steadfastly from the Connecticut River to meet the Berkshire ridge to the west, it may be difficult to imagine that this was once a land of cataclysmic geological changes. Five hundred million years ago, the waters of a great inland sea covered the region, which was largely flat. Over the course of ages, a dramatic geotectonic event took place – colliding continental plates thrust the sea floor upwards, eventually creating a range of mountains rising more than four miles above sea level. Three successive cycles of glaciation created the rounded peaks we know today as the Berkshires. These eroded roots of an ancient range are the oldest mountains in the western hemisphere.
While encroaching and retreating glaciers sculpted the land, they also left sediments on valley floors, which created pockets of soils that were conducive to the formation of wetlands and bogs. From these bogs, vegetation began to populate the formerly desolate landscape. Trees, such as spruce, then pine and birch, sprang up, followed later by oak and maple hardwoods. As vegetation began to temper the region's climate, animals from neighboring areas moved in, and not long after, the first human inhabitants arrived. These Paleoindians moved about in small family groups, hunting caribou and deer, and foraging for wild fruits and berries across the tundra, swamps, and scrub pinelands that then covered southern New England. One of the region's most unique features—the pitch-pine scrub oak communities of Mounts Tekoa and Shatterack in the southern Highlands town of Russell—is a geologic throwback to that distant period. Outwash from the last glacier left thick deposits of sand and gravel, providing the geological foundation for this globally rare habitat. Today, these uncommon natural communities are home to a host of rare species.
As the Highlands climate became milder, the Native American hunters and gatherers that occupied the region established agricultural communities along the valleys using farming techniques introduced, probably, from Central America. Eventually, the Mohican tribe settled along the banks of the Housatonic, “the place beyond the mountains,” while the Pocumtucks, a confederacy of several smaller tribes, came to occupy the valley of the “long river,” the Connecticut. Both tribes cultivated corn, squash, beans, and melon. Both fished and hunted seasonally in the surrounding hills and boiled sap for maple syrup in the spring.
In the early 1600s, when the first Europeans arrived, Native Americans had been living for some 13,000 years in what would become Massachusetts. Contact proved deadly for the indigenous peoples. Diseases contracted from early waves of European trappers and traders devastated the Indians, who had little or no immunity to European diseases. By the time the first settlements in western Massachusetts were being established in the late 1630s, it is estimated that the original population of Native Americans had dwindled from 150,000 to 20,000 in all of New England. Many historians believe that, had it not been for smallpox and other European diseases, the English would never have gained a foothold in New England.
As English immigrants moved into lands occupied by remaining Natives, English farming practices – fenced fields and free ranging livestock – disrupted Native agriculture and hunting. European agricultural practices also created a constant need for more land. Thus colonists negotiated a series of settlements with local tribes for control of the fertile farmlands along the Deerfield, Westfield, and Farmington rivers. In this way, as well as through armed conflict, Natives were gradually displaced, some moving northward into New France (Canada).
In the early 1700s, the farming communities of western Massachusetts found themselves at the forefront of an international clash of empires. As Queen Anne's War raged in Europe, New France sought to protect its underpopulated colonies by launching raids against New England frontier towns. Natives joined these raids for a variety of reasons – some through political pressure, others in the spirit of mourning wars in which captives were brought back for ransom or to replace lost tribe members. Attacks continued on Massachusetts valley towns throughout the French and Indian Wars, limiting settlements there and in the Highlands. With the Treaty of Paris in 1763, settlement increased rapidly. Between 1760 and 1790, the European population of western Massachusetts grew from 500 to nearly 30,000 inhabitants.
In the years between the end of the French and Indian Wars and the
start of the Revolution, Massachusetts, now a Royal Colony, divided the
land between the Housatonic and Connecticut rivers into four
plantations, which were then auctioned off to the highest bidders. The
first towns along the Massachusetts frontier were subsistence farming
communities, each with its village green and meetinghouse, which were
preconditions of becoming incorporated. While valley residents enjoyed
the rich alluvial soils of the river basins, hilltown settlers often
found soils that were too rocky for the cultivation of wheat crops, yet
ideal for livestock, especially sheep and cattle.
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