What a town is

The town hall in tiny Conway, Mass., a “Hill Town’’ that was home base for Archibald MacLeish for much of his adult life

“A town is not land, nor even landscape. A town is people living on the land. And whether it will survive or perish depends not on the land but on the people; it depends on what the people think they are….If they think of themselves as living a good and useful and satisfying life, if they put their lives first and the real estate business after, then there is nothing inevitable about the spreading ruin of the countryside.’’

— Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), in “A Lay Sermon on {western Massachusetts) Hill Towns’’. MacLeish was a playwright, poet, government official and lawyer.

A little jewel of a library in tiny Conway

— Photo by Friedrich St. Florian

Many small New England towns have some impressive public and private buildings. Consider this one — the Field Memorial Library, in Conway, Mass. (population about 1,900). The building , finished in 1901, was financed by the great Chicago retailer Marshall Field and named in memory of his parents, John and Fedelia Nash Field. Marshall Field was born on his parents’ Conway farm in 1834. He rose to become one of America’s richest men.

Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge of Boston were the architects of this jewel of a public library, working with Norcross Builders ,of Worcester, builders of the New York Public Library.

Bardwell's Ferry Bridge, built in 1882, is an historic lenticular truss bridge over the Deerfield River between Conway and Shelburne. It’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Conway is still something of a farming community (now with lots of “organic’’ crops). But this “Massachusetts Hilltown” has also lured some celebrities, most notably Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), a Modernist poet as well as a playwright, essayist and critic, and speechwriter for President Franklin Roosevelt. Besides the area’s rugged beauty, its proximity to the colleges in the Connecticut Valley just to the east has been a lure for writers, as has the Field Memorial Library.

— Robert Whitcomb