Springfield, Massachusetts gave America basketball and its first dictionary
In 1891 a Canadian teacher named James Naismith invented basketball in Springfield, Massachusetts, which is why the city calls itself Hoop City. It has another nickname too, the City of Firsts, earned by a long run of inventions ranging from the first American English dictionary to the country's first petrol-driven car.
English Puritan William Pynchon founded the town in 1636 as Agawam Plantation, on land bought from the Agawam people, and five years later renamed it after his hometown in Essex. Perched on bluffs where four rivers meet, at a crossroads of routes to Boston, Albany, New York and Montreal, it thrived as a farming settlement and trading post. During King Philip's War in 1675 most of it burned, and many residents survived by sheltering in John Pynchon's brick house, known as the Old Fort.
Its central position led George Washington and Henry Knox to put the national armory there in 1777. The armory made the first American musket in 1794 and later the Springfield rifle carried by Union troops, and its near-capture during Shays' Rebellion in 1787 fed directly into the Constitutional Convention. Abolitionist John Brown lived in the city, which was also a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Skilled armory workers seeded an inventive industrial culture. Merriam-Webster published its dictionary in 1805, Thomas Blanchard pioneered interchangeable parts and the assembly line in 1819, Charles Goodyear mass-produced vulcanised rubber in 1844, and the Duryea brothers built their car in 1893. Indian launched a motorcycle company in 1901, Smith & Wesson made guns, and the Wason works turned out the first manufactured sleeping car, at its peak rolling out 100 railcars a day.
The armory's closure in 1969, an elevated highway cutting off the riverfront and wider industrial decline brought hard decades. Recent projects include a $1 billion intercity rail link and a restored Union Station. The city counted 155,929 residents in 2020, the third largest in the state, and the armory site now holds the world's largest collection of historic American firearms.
Source: Springfield, Massachusetts
