Agawam

Agawam was an Indigenous village on the west bank of the Connecticut River in the Massachusetts valley, opposite the later site of Springfield. Its name appears in English records as Agawanus, Aggawom and Auguam. It has been interpreted as a place for unloading or curing fish, perhaps connected with the falls at Agawam and the flats at the mouth of the Westfield River. On 15 May 1636 William Pynchon bought land on both sides of the Connecticut from the Agawam, an early step in the English settlement of the valley. Riverfront mills, workshops and roads followed the river, and farmland spread toward the hills to the west over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.