The town is part of the Capitol Planning Region, and located in the Connecticut River Valley.

Ebenezer Gay, a renowned Congregational minister; U.S. Postmaster General Gideon Granger; real estate speculator Oliver Phelps, once the largest landowner in America; composer Timothy Swan; architect Henry A. Sykes; sculptor Olin Levi Warner; Seth Pease, surveyor of the Western Reserve lands in Ohio, most of which were controlled by Suffield financiers and speculators; and Thaddeus Leavitt,[5] inventor of an early cotton gin, merchant and patentee of the Western Reserve lands.

Throughout the Connecticut Valley, wealthy merchants, tavern owners and town ministers owned slaves.

When Major John Pynchon originally purchased from the Pequonnocks and Agawam tribes a six-mile tract of land, which he called Stoney Brooke Plantation, he first ordered the construction of a sawmill, and used two of his slaves, Harry and Roco, for the construction.

[11] Reverend Ebenezer Gay, Devotion's successor, owned six slaves throughout his long term, 1742–1796.

Dr. Asaph Leavitt Bissell, born in 1791 at Hanover, New Hampshire, to parents originally from Suffield,[14] attended Dartmouth College, and later graduated in the second class of the Yale Medical School.

Bissell moved to Suffield, where he rode horseback to make house calls on his patients.

Bissell's saddlebags are today in the collection of the Yale Medical School's Historical Society.

[16] The town center (Suffield Depot CDP) has a total area of 2.0 square miles (5.1 km2), all of it land.

Suffield is on the west bank of the Connecticut River, 8 miles (13 km) south of the river's largest city, Springfield, Massachusetts, and 16 miles (26 km) north of Connecticut's capital, Hartford.

Main Street, a designated historic district with the Green, three churches, Suffield Academy and vintage colonial and Victorian homes, typifies a New England town.