The Road That Changed Everything (July 27, 1996)
It’s one of the most invisible legacies of a monumental feat of my lifetime, so often taken for granted, that it begged my attention. as the four-lane highway that allows up to zip through the region at 65 miles an hour, oblivious to the slow pace of life here before its arrival… and how life was forever altered.
GREENFIELD – Eleanor Ingraham Weeks lives next door to the house where she was born in 1918. But it’s light years away from the community it was even 40 years ago.
From her Leyden Road home, she could watch summertime canoeists and wintertime skaters on Nash’s Pond, and could walk to church on the tiny common in the center of the road, or to the four-room schoolhouse at North Parish.
Today, only the school – though much larger – remains. The skaters and canoes have been replaced by a constant stream of traffic on Interstate 91, a lifeline Franklin County today takes for granted.
“It was sort of the end of an era,” said Weeks, 77, recalling the quietness of life beside the little pond dam. “We missed the sound of the water.”
Weeks, who recalls a day when North Parish people “didn’t go into town much,” when the Conway Street streetcar provided the only transportation to Main Street, said residents didn’t question whether this new project was needed.
The interstate, which has become as much a picture of the landscape as the hillsides that drivers can see from it, also took its toll at what is now Exit 28.
In the center of Bernardston was a millpond on the Fall River where fishing and skating were activities of a community seemingly more relaxed.
“Now PROGRESS has come to this area,” Bernardston’s 1962 history complained. “The pond is gone, filled many feet deep with earth. Gone are the fishermen, the cows, the boats; gone the reflections. In their places are the straight north-south lines of the new Highway 91 and the curves of the interchange with the Northfield Road. The distant hills remain; the bulldozers haven’t leveled them — yet.”
William Shores, a former Bernardston selectman whose family farm lost 52 acres to the interstate, recalls, “It cut the town in half. It ran right up the valley, and that’s where most of the farms were.”
From the beginning, the interstate that would rip a 400-foot swath through the middle of Franklin County was big news in a postwar boom era that also brought the marvel of atomic power to Rowe.
President Eisenhower’s nationwide network of highways, a colossal feat in the name of economic growth and national defense, was 90 percent federally funded and fueled a federal tax on gasoline and tires (Today there are 45,500 miles of interstate nationwide — 565 miles of them in Massachusetts alone. 1-91 cost an estimated $120 million, more than a quarter of it in Franklin County.)
Under the headline, “U.S. Road Plans Include County,” The Greenfield Recorder-Gazette announced on June 23, 1956, “Playing an important part in the inter-state highway program will be Route 5 from the Connecticut line to the Vermont border. The cost of this project alone is estimated at $100,000,000.”
The plains called for a bypass that would skirt Greenfield to the west announced state Public Works Commissioner John A. Volpe. From the outset, there were plans for combining the north-south interstate with a Route 2 bypass.
At the time, Route 2 ran right down Greenfield’s Main Street.
The Mansion House was the landmark at the Federal Street intersection, the crossroads of all Route 2 and Routes 5 and.10 traffic.
“Can you imagine all of that traffic from ‘”Route 2 and 91 passing -right through that intersection? It would be backed up beyond Beacon Street in summer and early fall,” said William Allen, who used to watch lines of out-of-state cars each weekend in front of his family’s Bernardston Road home when he was growing up. After leaving town in 1951, Allen returned late in the decade as an engineer on the southernmost interstate section in Vermont.
The mood in the ’50s was upbeat in a way that’s almost hard to imagine today.
“It was great,” said Allen of the excitement over the interstate. “Everybody could hardly wait. I just know people wanted it so bad they could taste it. It was a godsend.”
But Eleanor Weeks, whose father wrote the history of the church that was the town’s first parish, and whose mother was a choir member and organist there, recalls how upsetting the news was that North Parish Church was to be razed.
“There were a lot of meetings to discuss what they were going to do,” she said. “It was a little area that was very important to everybody in that vicinity. I don’t think we had too much choice. There was no such thing as fighting it.”
First to go was the parish house, the recreation building on the side of the pond that was home to basketball games and served as a warming pavilion for skaters. The church itself was rebuilt as First Congregational Church on Silver Street. Along the road’s path, dozens of houses had to be razed or moved, and thousands of acres became part of the right of way.
In the beginning, there was talk of an alignment that would have eliminated the Rugg Manufacturing Co. factory and would have passed east of the Deerfield River, alongside Routes 5 and 10 through Old Deerfield. A phone call to the White House by Deerfield Academy Headmaster Frank Boyden is credited with shifting the path to West Deerfield.
One of the alignment alternatives proposed. and discarded, would .have had the interstate enter Greenfield near Cheapside, as Routes 5 and 10, and run along Rocky Mountain to reduce mileage and the number of properties taken off town tax rolls.
Construction of the Bernardston section began in September 1958, and the “experimental” concrete stretch of roadway that represented a coup for the concrete industry — the same section that is under reconstruction this summer — was opened less than two years later.
Observant motorists along the interstate today can see the traces of temporary on- and off-ramps that were used during the years of interstate construction, as road machinery and then traffic moved was moved on and off the new highway. One is south of Bernardston, just before Routes 5 and 10 curves left under the interstate. Another is just north of the Vermont line.
“The thing sort of marched down the valley,” recalls Allen. “Once it started, traffic started to swell” Even if motorists could hop on for a 25-mile stretch of interstate to legally cruise at 65 mph, there was that much more incentive to travel. The first, $2.4 million, stretch of interstate opened in Bernardston in June 1960.
The $2.2 million section from Route 10 to the Greenfield town line opened with a roller-skating race on Sept. 24, 1960.
Land taking and negotiations through Greenfield and Deerfield were already under way. Stoneleigh-Prospect Hill School, which protested having the new roadway as its periphery, wasn’t as lucky — or as influential — as Deerfield Academy had been. Construction in Greenfield began late in 1961, and continued until December 1965.
Herbert Bushee of Greenfield, who was resident construction engineer on that section, recalled that heavy woods behind the school had to be removed, swampland dried and Cherry Rum Brook relocated. The 74-year-old former state Department of Public Works engineer said there was an excitement in feeling part of a nationwide project, just as there was a tremendous satisfaction in turning a piece of raw land into a highway.
“I don’t know how we’d build them in today’s (political) climate,” said Bushee. “But we can’t imagine living without it now.” A drive to Springfield in those days was an excursion that took more than an hour and a half, and sometimes longer, depending on traffic along Route 5. The two-lane roadway passed directly right through Northampton, Holyoke and Springfield.
“Springfield was an outing,” recalled Allen, who recalls going there on a rare shopping adventure, complete with a stop at the Forbes and Wallace department store. “It was like nothing you had in Greenfield.”
Erwin Coulson of Montague, who oversaw much of the interstate’s construction through Hampden County, recalls the struggles of commuting back and forth from his West Springfield home to the state’s DPW district office, then on Greenfield’s Main Street.
“In every town (along Routes 5) you’d have to slow down, and there would be congestion,” he recalled. Friday afternoon commuter traffic, combined with the relatively little northbound tourist traffic that did occur, would cause “nightmare” conditions, he said.
In South Deerfield, where Routes 5 and 10 ran right through the center of the village, the interstate linked up a 13-mile right of way from the old New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, Allen said
Despite protests by people whose land was affected, said Coulson, there was enthusiasm from business leaders who could see the gold that lay ahead along the new roadway.
With that in mind, and for the sake of convenience, there were requests for the state to consider more entrances and exits for the interstate: in northern Bernardston, at the Greenfield-Bernardston line, further south in Whately.
The North Bernardston proposal was pitched to help motels, gas stations and other businesses along Route 5 in that part of town. At one time, said Shores, there were 22 gas stations in town. Now there are two.
“Obviously, it was the death knell for a lot of tourist cottages,” said Allen
Margaret Fallon, 83, remembers running the Pioneer Valley Motel in Bernardston with her husband in the 1950s, just before the interstate was built.
“We were very busy back then,” she said. “We had a lot of customers from all over.”
Interstate construction through the county ended Oct. 25, 1966 with completion of an 8.7-mile section from Greenfield to Whately. The opening was followed by a colossal eight-mile traffic jam on Columbus Day weekend.
The Greenfield Recorder reported on what was described as the worst traffic jam in Greenfield history.
“The long lines of cars backed up on Rte. 91 proved fascinating for Greenfield motorists, who took a look at the foliage from the vantage point of unclogged side roads … (I)t was quite a sight for Greenfield, where Rte. 91 is still somewhat of a novelty. Radiators gushed skyward as the anti-freeze boiled under the pressure of creeping along. At one point, it looked like a miniature Yellowstone Park, an observer said.
At opening ceremonies near the Mohawk Trail, Greenfield Selectman Roger Sitterly said, “I predict that Greenfield will prosper and grow with the completion of this highway.”
Gas stations and restaurants in town complained within the first week, however, that business had begin to drop off. And a “travelers aid” station, on the interstate, first called for in 1964, intensified in an effort that has continued to this day.
As hard as it is to imagine Franklin County today without the interstate, Allen said, it’s even harder to imagine a public works project of this scale being approved today.
“The environmentalists wouldn’t let you get out of the box,” said Allen. “But you’ve got these masses of people who’ve got to go from here to there.”
Before concern about wetlands, construction crews pushed their roadway through swamps, through upland, through ledge. Shores recalls the enormous task of clearing woodland as the construction process started up, with constant burning of brush and blasting through rock. “They didn’t care too much about the environment in those days. They would cut and burn. Some of the fires got away from them. They blew rock all the way to Route 5. You couldn’t do things like that today.”
With the project came plenty of construction jobs, said Allen, although many of the laborers were paid $1.25 an hour for 54-hour-long weeks. Many of the workers moved temporarily to the area, he said.
I-91 opened this area up to commerce and ultimately changed life here forever, said Allen and others.
But for Weeks, Shores, Fallon and others, it also left memories of a part of the county that is no more.
“We almost thought, ‘Could it have been put to the north or south?’ recalled Weeks. “They called it progress, but it would have been nice to have it as an historic place.” — RICHIE DAVIS