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"Deerfield Gave Warm Reception To Trolleys"

(c) Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield MA. All rights reserved.
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This complete summary of the Deerfield, Massachusetts, trolley debate of 1900 was printed in a nearby newspaper in 1960. Deerfield's residents feared the trolley as a force of modernization and worried that it would change the town's character. In a sense, they were correct: the town's reputation was built by visitors coming for its seemingly unspoiled antiquity and many of them rode the trolley. The trolley, completed in late 1900, ran for more than twenty years. But an even more powerful force for change, the automobile, was about to explode on the town and the trolley line was forced into bankruptcy and closure in 1924.

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