Northfield is a town in Franklin County, Massachusetts, United States. Northfield was first settled in 1673. The population was 2,866 at the 2020 census. It is part of the Springfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area. The Connecticut River runs through the town, dividing West Northfield from East Northfield and the village of Northfield, where the town hall is located.

Part of the town is included in the census-designated place of Northfield.

The village of Skakeat/Squakheag was the site of modern-day Northfield and was home to the Nashaway Nipmuc and Sokoki Abenaki. Northfield was first colonized by European settlers in 1673 and was officially incorporated in 1723. Indian Land Deeds for Hampshire County, Including Later Berkshire, Franklin, and Hampden Counties, gives the name of the otan (village) as Squakheag (a Nipmuk name), also Skakeat (Sokoki Abenaki). John Eliot, in his Brief Narrative…History of the Nipmuk, attributes this village to the Nipmuc.

The territory was successfully defended a number of times by Native Americans. The Battle on Beer’s Plain occurred in Nothfield in 1675. Peter Jethro, a Praying Indian, a son of Tantamous, a Nipmuc originally from Concord who was reputed to be a pauwau, spent a brief stint in the Northfield area as a Christian minister before a massacre plunged him into King Philip’s War. During the war, Peter Jethro freed a settler who was being heldcaptive near Northfield. As a result of the conflict, New England settlers were occasionally taken north to Quebec, held as hostages by the French, causing the town to revert to American Indian control a few times. Eventually, conflicts with the Native American population ceased after most of the native population was displaced and/or sold into slavery as a result of King Philip’s War and after a series of massacres of local Indian villages.

During Dummer’s War, on August 13, 1723, Gray Lock raided Northfield, and four warriors killed two citizens near the town. The next day they attacked Joseph Stevens and his four sons in Rutland. Stevens escaped, two boys were killed, and the other two sons were captured.

Much of Northfield’s development in the late nineteenth century was spurred by the work of evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody, a native of Northfield who established the Northfield Seminary for Girls in 1879 on a sweeping hillside in East Northfield. The school was the site of Moody’s religious conferences, which attracted thousands of visitors to Northfield each summer. The influx of visitors led to the development of the town as a summer resort, especially after the opening of the Northfield Hotel in 1887. Francis Schell, a New York capitalist attracted by his interest in Moody’s work at the Northfield Seminary, commissioned architect Bruce Price to design a summer home, which became known as the Northfield Chateau. Patterned after a French château but fanciful in style with prominent turrets and 99 rooms. The chateau was later converted into a guest house to go with the Northfield Hotel which was across the street. A golf course was installed on the large grass lawns of the hotel. In the 1960’s Northfield Mount Herman School purchased the hotel and the Chateau. It was decided they did not want to manage these venues and the hotel and the Chateau were demolished. The school failed to notify guests of the closing of the Hotel and people were still arriving while the building was being demolished. All that is left today is the golf course and some former workers maintenance buildings. Northfield Mount Herman School sold the property to Snow’s Landscaping in the 2010’s. Snow’s manages the Northfield Golf Club and event venue.

The Vermont and Massachusetts Railroad had established rail service to Northfield by 1850, along a line running from Millers Falls, Massachusetts, to Brattleboro, Vermont. Even though the railway crossed the Connecticut River in Northfield, East Northfield Station was actually located in West Northfield, making it necessary for disembarking passengers to travel back across the Connecticut River on the lower deck of the rail bridge. To provide for safer and more convenient access across the river, Francis Schell gave $45,000 for the construction of a new steel bridge. The Schell Bridge is a Pennsylvania truss structure of impressive design, which crosses the river in one span of 515 feet (157 m).