For 365 years, Main Street has been a crossroads, marketplace, town center, and public square. In 1655, English settlers built their meeting house on a small hill at the center of their new village, near where the courthouse stands today. The wide rutted road in front of the meeting house became Main Street.
The exhibit Making it on Main Street includes a 12-foot long model showing Main Street, Northampton in the mid-19th century. The Amherst Railway Society, under the direction of John Sacerdote (immediate past president), undertook the year-long project to reconstruct the Main Street of 1847, the last year that the railroad and canal were both in operation. The canal, which began in New Haven and ended in Northampton, entered downtown just west of South Street, crossed Main Street and ran down what is now State Street before continuing to the Connecticut River. It ceased operation after the 1847 season. Two years prior, on December 13, 1845, the first train came into Northampton along tracks crossing the other end of Main Street.
In the mid-1800s, Main Street was the center of a rural village. The first store - an apothecary - had opened 1769, the first of a group of stores on the south side of Main Street that came to be known as "Shop Row."
Residential homes co-existed with shops and public buildings. Several stately houses on large lots with gardens and orchards remained on Main Street: the Ebenezer Hunt house (site of Northampton City Hall); the Judge Joseph Lyman house across the street; the Polly Pomeroy House (site of Fitzwilly's); the Theodore Strong house on the corner of Main and Pleasant Street and the gambrel-roof house of Lewis Strong, son of Governor Caleb Strong (now Strong Avenue).
But Main Street was changing fast. The Theodore Strong house was purchased by Harvey Kirkland, who moved it in line with shops on Main Street's Shop Row and remodeled it as a commercial block. Advertisements for Kirkland's Block in January 1847 show new stores for D. Converse Boots and Shoes and the millinery of Miss. A.A. Fenner. In 1850, the former home of Caleb Strong was moved from lower Main Street to face Pleasant Street now that the railroad ran alongside its original location. By 1849, the grandest homestead of them all, the Ebenezer Hunt house, which had an orchard on the Old South Street hillside, would be purchased by a group of investors who subdivided the lot. The western end was sold to the town for the site of the new town hall (now City Hall). On the eastern end of the property rose a commercial block fronting Main Street.
In 1847, New larger commercial buildings were replacing houses and small wooden shops.
Residential homes co-existed with shops and public buildings. Several stately houses on large lots with gardens and orchards remained on Main Street: the Ebenezer Hunt house (site of Northampton City Hall); the Judge Joseph Lyman house across the street; the Polly Pomeroy House (site of Fitzwilly's); the Theodore Strong house on the corner of Main and Pleasant Street and the gambrel-roof house of Lewis Strong, son of Governor Caleb Strong (now Strong Avenue).
But Main Street was changing fast. The Theodore Strong house was purchased by Harvey Kirkland, who moved it in line with shops on Main Street's Shop Row and remodeled it as a commercial block. Advertisements for Kirkland's Block in January 1847 show new stores for D. Converse Boots and Shoes and the millinery of Miss. A.A. Fenner. In 1850, the former home of Caleb Strong was moved from lower Main Street to face Pleasant Street now that the railroad ran alongside its original location. By 1849, the grandest homestead of them all, the Ebenezer Hunt house, which had an orchard on the Old South Street hillside, would be purchased by a group of investors who subdivided the lot. The western end was sold to the town for the site of the new town hall (now City Hall). On the eastern end of the property rose a commercial block fronting Main Street.
In 1847, New larger commercial buildings were replacing houses and small wooden shops.
The starting point for the model was the writing of Henry S. Gere (1828-1914), longtime publisher of the Hampshire Gazette. At age 74, Gere looked back at the Main Street he knew in his youth. He walked readers down the center of town from canal to railroad. Building by building, he described his memories of the residents and shop keepers within. Other local history sources filled in the gaps, including photographs, maps, deeds, street directories, published engravings, newspaper articles, and advertisements. The Amherst Railway Society used all this research, gathered by Marie Panik, and plans drawn by architect Chuck Whitham, to create this model.
The model, which is set up in the center of the exhibit space shows 50 buildings that were there in 1847. It also shows the change in Main Street’s topography, the park-like common on Main Street in front of the First Church and the courthouse, buildings under construction, a train, canal boat, scenes of everyday life, an orchard and gardens, towering elm trees, and dozens of shops with their signs.