Upper Main Street Historic District

Upper Main Street runs north from the center of Hatfield, Massachusetts, and forms a district of farmhouses, barns and open fields that follows the town's original 17th-century layout. Settlers laid out narrow house lots along the street in 1661 and assigned meadow land to the north, and the northern meadows are still unfenced and farmed. Houses range from the Justin Waite House of about 1705 to modest Federal and Greek Revival farmhouses, several attributed to local carpenter Hiram Marsh, with a cluster of higher-style late 19th-century buildings near Main and North Streets. Tobacco, onions and potatoes were grown here, and livestock, horse and tobacco barns remain, though some early tobacco barns are vacant and deteriorating. The district was listed for its agricultural history, its architecture, and the way its settlement pattern has survived from 1705 through 1944, with 104 contributing resources.