Chesterfield, Massachusetts
town in Massachusetts, USA
Chesterfield is a rural hill town in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, United States, 26 miles (42 km) east of Pittsfield, 75 miles (120 km) west of Worcester, and 90 miles (140 km) west of Boston. The population was 1,186 at the 2020 census. It is part of the Springfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area.
History
Chesterfield was first settled in 1760 and was officially incorporated in 1762. It was named after the Earl of Chesterfield. The town center, established after the Revolution, has well-preserved Federal period houses along Main Road. In its early days, the town supported a largely agricultural economy, with wool from Merino sheep as a major product. However, there were sawmills and tanneries in operation as well as cloth dressing mills, and in the early 19th century these superseded farming and brought in a small immigrant population that was mostly Irish. Progress wiped out most of the industry in Chesterfield, and by the start of the 20th century a re-emerging agricultural economy developed alongside the growing trade from summer residents.
Geography
According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 31.2 square miles (80.9 km2), of which 30.8 square miles (79.9 km2) are land and 0.4 square miles (1.0 km2), or 1.27%, are water.
“Chesterfield, Massachusetts” enters the record as town in Massachusetts, USA. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Chesterfield, Massachusetts and town can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2414206. VIAF identifies the subject as 140931885. The Library of Congress control number is n2005171129. Authority coordinates are 42.392, -72.840. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2020, 1760 and 1762.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chesterfield, Massachusetts” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.