The house at 225 Elm Street, at the corner of Franklin Street, was built around 1910 by Elbridge G. Southwick (1842-1925). The house was constructed on the former homestead of Henry Edwards, which Southwick purchased in 1906.
The brick house at 21 Park Street in Florence in Northampton was built in 1846 by Hall Judd, a founder and last secretary of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry. Part of the communitarian movement of the nineteenth century, the NAEI was a utopian community that was dissolved the same year that Judd was building his home. From 1851 to 1894, the house residence to (his widow?) Frances P. Judd. Dormer windows and a wraparound porch were added to the house around 1910. The house has a hidden staircase that suggests it was used in the Underground Railroad.
On Main Street in Northampton are two nearly identical commercial blocks located side-by-side. The Fleming Block, on the left, was built in 1868 at 189-191 Main Street. It replaced the earlier Lyman Block. The Astman or Williams Block, on the right, was built in 1871 at 183-187 Main Street to replace a building destroyed in the fire of 1870.
Sojourner Truth, whose name at birth was Isabella, was born an enslaved woman in upstate New York in approximately 1797. Slavery was finally abolished in the state in 1827. Taking the name Sojourner Truth, she would become a leading anti-slavery and woman’s rights lecturer. Starting in 1843, Truth was a member of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry. Located in the part of Northampton which would later come to be called Florence, the NAEI was a utopian community dedicated to abolitionism and equality. She continued to live in Northampton after the NAEI disbanded in 1846. Truth, who could not read or write, dictated her memoirs to her friend, Olive Gilbert. Sales of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth (first published in 1850), paid for her house, at 35 Park Street in Florence, where she lived from 1849/1850 to 1857. Her friend, Samuel L. Hill, who was the spiritual leader of the Northampton Association, held the mortgage on the house, which Sojourner Truth paid in 1854. In 1857, she moved to Battle Creek, Michigan, where she lived the remainder of her life.
In 1860-1861, Northampton manufacturer W.T. Clement built a brick house at what is now 289 Elm Street. In 1879, he sold the house to A.S. Wood, who hired architect William Fenno Pratt to make improvements to building in the form of mansard roofs and a tower.
Union Station in Northampton was built in 1896-1897. A train station that consolidated the services of Northampton’s three railroads, it has also been home to the Union Station restaurant, which closed last year, and the Tunnel Bar, located in a tunnel that was once an entrance to the station.
The Academy of Music, in Northampton, is a theater built in 1891 and designed by William C. Brockelsby of Hartford, CT. The theater was built in 1891 by philanthropist Edward H.R. Lyman, who gave it to to the City of Northampton the following year. It was the first municipally-owned theater in the nation and continues as a venue for live performances and film screenings.