The Town of Florida is a village on the summit of the Green Mountain range, in the northwest corner of Berkshire County. Quiet and peaceful now, the town was once a boom town as the staging site for construction of a tunnel through Hoosac Mountain. It is largely bordered by the Deerfield R
iver and is a succession of hills and valleys containing some of the highest peaks in Massachusetts. Winter is long and cold in Florida and during the Revolution when a band of troops tried to cross over the mountain in winter they almost perished of cold and exposure. The first settler in Florida was Dr. Daniel Nelson from Stamford, Connecticut, who arrived in 1783. The doctor came by horseback from Longmeadow and settled on a homestead on the Deerfield River.
The town may have chosen its name, some historians conjecture, because at the time it was named the most general topic of conversation was the purchase by the United States of the territory of Florida from the Spanish. A tourist guide to the Berkshires of 1889 describes the town as having elevations of 1,000' to 1400' and of containing drives that "are grandly panoramic". From the top of Hoosac Mountain the view shows Mt. Graylock, Mt. Adams, the Hoosic River, villages, railroads and towns spilling down the slopes of the hills. Florida contains one of the famous waterfalls of the Berkshires, the Twin Cascades.
Florida's first boom time came in the second half of the 19th century, when in order to complete the rail link between Boston and West, the railroad had to bore a tunnel through Hoosac Mountain to North Adams. After surveys were completed in 1850, work began at both ends of the tunnel. The tunnel, when completed, was 25,081' or 4 3/4 miles long, most of which is contained within the boundaries of the Town of Florida. More than a 1,000 men worked day and night on the tunnel, and it took four years to sink the 1,000' long shaft that bored straight down into the bowels of the mountain and over 20 years to finish the tunnel completely.
In 1875 the first trains moved through the 20' high, 24' wide engineering marvel which required the removal of 1.9 million tons of rock at a cost of $14 million and 195 lives. In more recent times the lure of fishing what has been described as "the Number One trout stream in the county" has drawn sportsmen to Florida. Recognized as a superior trout fishing stream by the state's Department of Fish and Game, the Florida section of the Deerfield River is very wide, from 25' to 150' wide and contains brown, rainbow and brook trout. Residents in the late 1930's claimed that fish caught in Florida from the Deerfield River were larger than those from anywhere else in the Berkshires.
