Dwight, Massachusetts
[4] Today the community is known for its natural beauty, scenic waterfalls, wildlife, forests, ponds, lakes, brooks, springs, hiking trails, and bike paths.
The Town of Pelham annexed a square mile section on its southern border that incorporated part of North Belchertown and included the village of Packardsville in 1786.
The peak of West Hill, a region of colonial settlement in Dwight known for its panoramic view of the Holyoke Range and the Connecticut River Valley, is 1.6 linear miles northeast of the center, and measures 1,070 feet above sea level.
Holland Glen is a 290-acre conservation forest southeast of the center of Dwight that features hiking trails, waterfalls, small pools and “a deep, narrow chasm with steep sides covered thickly with a growth of pine and hemlock.
To the immediate west of Dwight in South Amherst is the Lawrence Swamp, a thousand acres of forested wetland, scrub-shrub floodplain, and open meadow and habitat for rare species of birds and wildlife.
The Swamp is most accessible at the Norwottuck Branch Rail Trail entrance on Station Road in South Amherst, which becomes North Street in Dwight.
Dwight is located in a valley that was covered in water some 15,000 years ago and formed the far eastern shore of the ancient glacial Lake Hitchcock.
[12][13] Glaciers deposited sediment-dammed lakes in the Jabish Brook and Broad Brook valleys and an ice-dammed glacial lake in the Knights Pond valley, and coarse- and fine-grained sand deposits along State Route 9, Warren Wright Road, the Lawrence Swamp, and near the Dwight Cemetery.
The lowest elevation, 170 feet, is east Warren Wright Road as it crosses the Hop Brook through the Topping Farm Conservation Area.
The area's glacial history is also seen in numerous ponds and wetlands and, most notably, in the three kettle-hole lakes – Metacomet, Arcadia, and Holland – immediately south of Dwight.
Most all land in North Belchertown and Dwight is part of the Lawrence Swamp Watershed Protection Zone that supplies the Town of Amherst with drinking water.
As part of Belchertown, the village is a crossroads of Native trails in the Connecticut River Valley in Western Massachusetts that indigenous people traveled, including the Pocumtuc, Nipmuc and Norwottuck, or Nonotuck and Nolwotogg, among others.
[19] Artifacts found in the early 20th century just south of Dwight, near Lake Metacomet, suggest, "evidence of Native American occupations" that began some 7,000 years ago.
[20] It is about six miles due east of the bend in the Connecticut River at the former Native American settlement where the Towns of Hadley and Northampton are located today.
They were "said to have been the first … to make a permanent residence" and "received from Governor Belcher, five hundred acres of land, as an inducement … to settle [Belchertown].
[4] He was among the first to settle to the south of Dwight, with Hannah Lyman (1708-1792), in 1731, at what would become Cold Spring, then Belcher's Town, and owned most of the land that today comprises the Common.
Others followed including Elisha Munsell (1728–1810) and Dorothy Redington (1727–1807), newlyweds who settled on the Great Hill by at least 1759, east of the center of Dwight, where a cemetery bears the family name.
Three schools existed historically in the region, including near the center (Union), in the northeast (West Hill) and in the southeast (Prospect).
[28] Harrison Dwight donated land upon which he erected the train station and water tower for the locomotives, and owned the adjacent sawmill on the Scarborough Brook where he made carriages as well.
[29] Lafayette Washington Goodell (1851–1920) began a flower seed business on his father's "rundown" farm at Dwight in 1868 with a $25 investment.
He erected greenhouses and ponds for aquatic plants and called the place Pansy Park, which "drew summertime travelers intent on witnessing the gorgeous floral displays.” It featured a wide array of thousands of popular and exotic plants like pansies, petunias, pinks and asters.
[30] These included Emperor William's blue corn-flower, and in the aquatic gardens on the site, the world's second largest water lily, the Victoria Regia, from the Amazon.
[33] In the 2018 film Wild Nights with Emily, the character playing the Springfield Daily Republican Editor Samuel Bowles asks Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, poet Emily Dickinson's sister-in-law, whether she is still teaching Sunday school to the "poor children" in "Logtown," which is today known as Dwight.
