Turners Falls Historic District

The village of Turners Falls was founded in the 1790s, when a canal was dug around the falls of the Connecticut River as part of a water-based transportation network. The canal remained in operation until the 1840s, when more reliable railroad transport rendered it obsolete. In 1867, Alvah Crocker, a businessman from Fitchburg, sought to harness the river's power for industrial use, and purchased the rights of the defunct transport canal. Crocker and his partners replaced the transport canal with a larger power canal, where the water power could be sold to adjacent businesses.^[2] Adjacent to the power canal, Crocker laid out a grid of streets (numbered in one orientation, lettered in the other), with Avenue A as its principal thoroughfare.^[3]

The first major business to locate there was the Russell Manufacturing Company, a Greenfield-based manufacturer of cutlery. Its plant, which has not survived, was the largest cutlery factory in the world at its greatest extent. The most prominent surviving industrial works are those of the Keith Paper Company, which was founded in 1871 but whose oldest buildings date to 1877. The village street grid encompassed worker housing (for various classes of labor and management), as well as the commercial district located mainly on Avenue A.^[2]

• National Register of Historic Places listings in Franklin County, Massachusetts