Turners Falls is an unincorporated village and census-designated place in the town of Montague in Franklin County, Massachusetts, United States.

Village of Turners Falls

It is part of the Springfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area. Its name is generally used as a metonym for the entire town of Montague, for which it is the business district and comprises more than half the population.

The village of Turners Falls was founded in 1868 as a planned industrial community by Alvah Crocker, a railroad man and papermaker 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, Lawrence and Holyoke. Crocker's vision was to attract industry to the town by offering cheap hydropower that was made 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 those companies and to sell individual building lots to mill workers who would come to work in the mills. The village was laid out in a grid pattern with cross streets in an alpha-numeric sequence.>/p>

The largest of five villages, Turners Falls was named after the 1000-foot long, 30-foot high waterfall, that stretches across the Connectucut River between Gill, MA on the north side and Turners Falls at the south side.

The fall was nameless. In 1828, Prof. Edward Hitchcock from Amherst College, Professor of Chemistry, Geology and Natural History, on one of his geological forays to the area was delighted with the scenery at the falls and he named the site . . . Turners Falls, In memory of Capt. William Turner, who, in 1676 engaged a gathering of Indians on the north bank (Gill side) of the river and the outcome of the encounter proved to be the beginning of the end of the King Philip War.
Source: Wikipedia and the Montague Historical Society.

Read more about Turners Falls at the Montague Historical Society website.

Return to the Montague Historical Society Home Page

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