If you drive along West Street in Granby and come to the intersection with Amherst Street, there isn't much about the crossroads today that announces, this used to be the center of town.
But it was.
Long before the common, Town Hall and churches farther east became the Granby center we know today, this was where the community gathered. And the reason that center existed in the first place tells much of the story of how Granby became a town.
The first European settlers began arriving in what is now Granby around 1727, when this land was still part of South Hadley. Most families were farmers, scattered across a landscape that must have looked very different from the one we know now: cleared fields and pastures around individual farms, but also extensive woods, wetlands and rough country between them.
As settlement spread eastward, getting to the South Hadley meetinghouse became increasingly inconvenient. In colonial New England, the meetinghouse was far more than a church. It was where religious services were held, but it was also at the center of civic life. Where you put the meetinghouse effectively determined where you put the community.
And people argued about it.
Residents in the eastern part of South Hadley wanted a meetinghouse closer to where they lived. The dispute eventually went to the courts, which decided that a new meetinghouse should be built closer to the center of South Hadley instead.
The people out here took another route.
They created their own community.
A meetinghouse was erected near what is now the corner of West and Amherst streets, and in 1768 Granby was formally incorporated as a separate town. The population was only about 475 people. The town says Granby was named for John Manners, the Marquis of Granby, a British military figure from the Seven Years' War.
A village at the crossroads
It is difficult now to picture West and Amherst as downtown Granby.
There were no cars, utility poles or paved roads. West Street would have been a country road connecting farms and neighboring settlements. Travel was by foot, horseback or wagon.
But around the meetinghouse grew the things a small New England community needed. Homes stood nearby, along with businesses and places where neighbors could meet, exchange news and conduct the ordinary business of life.
For the families living around here, this wasn't the western outskirts of Granby.
It was Granby.
There is still a physical reminder of that earlier landscape. A stone and plaque at the intersection commemorate the site of the old meetinghouse. The town's own historical account specifically identifies the corner of West and Amherst as the location.
And some of the old houses survived.
That is one of the things I find fascinating about living here. We tend to think of history as something preserved behind glass or marked by a sign. But in Granby, much of it is simply mixed into the landscape. You can drive past an old house a thousand times without thinking about the people who built it, the road they traveled or what the neighborhood around it looked like when that house was new.
Then the town moved
Granby didn't literally move, of course.
Its center did.
As settlement continued, the location at West and Amherst became increasingly inconvenient for people living farther east. In 1821 a new meetinghouse was built near what became the present town center.
Not everybody was pleased.
The move contributed to a division between East and West parishes, another reminder of just how important the location of a meetinghouse could be in a New England town. Most of the West Parish eventually reunited with the East Parish in 1836.
Gradually the civic and commercial center followed.
Today, when someone says "the center of Granby," we picture the common and the collection of historic buildings surrounding it. The town describes that area as retaining much of the character it has had for the past century.
West and Amherst became just another crossroads.
The swamp beside the town
There is another part of this story that especially interests us at Sweet Botanicals.
Pitchawam Swamp is right here.
In our previous post, we wrote about the large wetland that still occupies this part of Granby. About five of our eight acres are part of that same swamp landscape.
It is easy today to think of a swamp as someplace away from civilization, a wild patch of land beyond the places where people live.
But early Granby grew right beside it.
The meetinghouse and the first town center stood near the southern end of the Pitchawam wetland. The farms, roads and houses of early Granby existed alongside a landscape of wet woods, streams, beaver habitat and seasonally flooded ground.
In other words, the swamp wasn't somewhere beyond town.
It was part of the neighborhood.
That relationship between human settlement and the land is still visible if you know what you're looking at. West Street follows the higher, usable ground. Houses sit where generations of people found places dry enough to build. Behind them the land falls away into woods and wetlands that resisted the plow and, later, development.
Those wet places are one reason parts of the old landscape survived.
Looking at an ordinary corner differently
That's what makes the intersection of West and Amherst interesting to me.
There isn't a reconstructed colonial village there. There aren't crowds of tourists. Most people drive through in a few seconds.
But imagine stopping there around 1770.
Granby is only a couple of years old. The meetinghouse stands nearby. A horse and wagon come along West Street. Smoke rises from the chimneys of neighboring farms. Someone is walking toward the meetinghouse. Beyond the cleared ground are woods, and beyond those woods is the wet country of Pitchawam.
For the people standing there, this isn't "historic Granby."
It's just home.
More than two and a half centuries later, we're living on the same landscape. The roads have changed. The town center moved. Forest returned to many former fields. Houses appeared where farms once stood.
But the swamp is still here.
And if you know where to look, so is the old center of Granby.
Sources
Town of Granby, Open Space and Recreation Plan, History of the Community.
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