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Strung along a remote stretch of the West Branch of the Westfield River like unpolished gemstones on a sparkling chain, a series of remarkable arch bridges from the earliest days of the railroad lie tucked among the steep hillsides. Marvels of early ingenuity, the dry-laid stone bridges tower up to ninety feet above the river, and carry an abandoned roadbed that, in the space of a couple of miles, crosses from Chester into Middlefield, to Becket, then back to Middlefield. Their construction at a time when only the most rudimentary tools and the backs of mostly immigrant labor were available to the builders to pile the tons of granite inspires awe in anyone who knows their history.
Designed and engineered by Major George Washington Whistler (father of the well-known painter James Abbott Whistler and husband to the mother he made famous), the keystone arch bridges of the Westfield River were a crucial part of the first major trunk line of the brand new railroad system- the first large-scale application of the technology that had been born scarcely a decade prior to their construction. They were built in 1840 and 1841 as the Summit, or Mountain, Division of the Western Railroad, which would link Boston with Albany, and, through the Erie Canal, with the great Midwestern "bread basket"...
...It had been discovered in the early fifteenth century that, like waterborne barges, carriages mounted on rails increased the tonnage that could be towed by a draft animal. Rails, however, had the advantage over canals of a more universal applicability. In 1814, George Peterson built the first successful steam locomotive in Northumberland, England and by 1825, steam was powering the transport of freight and passengers on the Stockton and Darlington Railroad in England. The first railroad in the United States, a horse-drawn affair, was roughly three miles long and was constructed in 1826 to transport granite from a quarry on the Neponset River for the building of the Bunker Hill monument. Beginning that same year, virtually on the heels of the Boston to Albany canal report, a petition was made for an exploration of the practicality of a railway linking Boston with Albany. A select committee of the House was appointed and "instructed to report information and estimates of expense as they deem proper." According to the History of the Connecticut Valley, this was probably the first concerted initiative exploring the construction of a railway in Massachusetts.