Editor’s Note:This story from 1996 recalls the addition of the four-lane highway, Interstate 91, through western Massachusetts.
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 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 The skaters and canoes have been replaced by a constant stream of traffic on Interstate 91, a lifeline Franklin County today takes for granted.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 the late 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.”