The area around the Hampshire and Mountain Farms Malls along Route 9 is a major shopping destination for the surrounding communities.

[6] In the following century, these were broken off into precincts and eventually the separate towns of Hatfield, Amherst, South Hadley, Granby and Belchertown.

Lt. Gen. Edward Whalley and Maj. Gen. William Goffe, two Puritan generals hunted for their role in the execution (or "regicide") of Charles I of England, were hidden[7] in the home of the town's minister, John Russell.

During King Philip's War, an attack by Native Americans was, by some accounts, thwarted with the aid of General Goffe.

Hadley's transformation from an old agricultural order to the new form is the direct result of expansion of the nearby University of Massachusetts Amherst during the 1960s.

Today, the Hadley economy is a mixture of agriculture and commercial development, including big-box stores and the Hampshire Mall.

However, many local residents support commercial development, and about 1,000 people signed a petition asking for a new Wal-Mart, saying it would save them money on their groceries.

The developer of the site (Hampshire Mall) filed and lost numerous appeals but continued its legal challenges of the commission's findings.

[12] Many residents also opposed rezoning to accommodate a new Lowe's store because they said it would be too big and would require more filling of wetlands than allowed by state law.

And, in 2010, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection found that Lowe's had illegally filled large areas of wetlands on that site and fined the developer more than $15,000.

Watch listing seeks to raise awareness about this rare survivor of 17th-century agriculture, promote visitation, and engage the local community in its stewardship.The landscape of Hadley is largely open-field farming, which was only used in the earliest New England settlements and had mostly disappeared by the 18th century; its survival in Hadley on such a large scale is unusual.

According to the World Monument Fund 165 acres (0.67 km2) are zoned for residential and commercial use, providing no long-term protection for the historic landscape.

Due to its climate and soils, one of its staple crops for the last two centuries has consistently been its asparagus, which has been described as competing in Boston markets despite local availability of the crop from other nearby regions, as well as in restaurants in France and Germany, and Queen Elizabeth II's own annual spring feast in England.