Photographs from the nomination case file, National Park Service records.
Freight Yard Historic District
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in
1972. A historic map-sheet match is not published yet. The record needs a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary.
From the record
“Western Gateway Heritage State Park was a history-focused Massachusetts state park in the city of North Adams managed by the Department of Conservation and Recreation. Exhibits at the park, which was located in a former railyard, told the story of the creation of the Hoosac Tunnel.”
Wikipedia article Western Gateway Heritage State Park, CC BY-SA 4.0.
one of 94 National Register listings in Berkshire County · listed in 1972 · category: District · one of 1 National Historic Landmarks in Berkshire County.
National Register reference number.72000131- the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.
Fires near this property
31 since 2006
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The
federal wildfire occurrence database
lists 31 fires within 5 miles of Freight Yard Historic District between
2006 and 2018, burning about 310 acres in total. 1 started naturally. None was recorded as arson.
Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted
here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.
Reported cause
Fires
Debris and open burning
14
Recreation and ceremony
5
Smoking
5
Equipment and vehicle use
4
Missing data/not specified/undetermined
2
Natural
1
The most recent of
them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service
that recorded it.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. Museums hold 893 specimens
collected within 10 miles of Freight Yard Historic District between 1828 and
1975: 434 Plantae, 246 Animalia, 192 Fungi, 11 Protozoa, 7 Unrecorded, 3 Chromista. 12 distinct Species records are shown.
Collected by A K Harrison, A Schwartz, A. H. Gustafson and others. Each is a
physical object with a catalogue
number, and each entry opens the museum's record. This is what was
collected and kept, not a survey of what lives here - nothing can be
concluded from a species being absent.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The federal mineral resources record lists
11 workings within 5 miles of Freight Yard Historic District: 4 producers, 4 past producers, 1 plant, 1 unknown.
5 still produce. What was taken out: Stone, Crushed/Broken, Limestone, General, Sand and Gravel, Construction, Calcium. Distance is straight-line from the
map coordinates, so a quarry counted here may appear on a neighbouring
settlement's page as well.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The National Weather Service names
North Adams, the town this property stands in, in 50 storm reports between 1994 and 2024: 26 thunderstorm wind, 10 hail, 5 lightning, 5 flash flood.
The reports record 1 injury. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office
filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date
opens the federal record of that event.
A National Weather Service Storm Survey Team found straight line wind damage in North Adams. Most of the damage was confined to a one half mile, by two block area on the campus of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.||Significant roof damage occurred to three college dormitories, mostly from tin flashing that was torn off due to the strong winds. In addition, several trees and large tree limbs were also downed, one of which smashed a car in the parking lot near the alumni office on Montana Street. Approximately 400 students were evacuated due to the damage.||The damage was consistent with maximum wind speeds of near 100 MPH.
Clarksburg Town Administrator Carl McKinney reported Millard Avenue suffering serious damage from heavy rainfall. In addition, the Clarksburg Town Hall basement was taking on water.
Early on August 16, lightning from a thunderstorm struck a house in North Adams, narrowly missing a man. Lightning produced a hole inside a bedroom and damaged a peak in the house. A small fire, started by the same lightning bolt, briefly flared up. Firemen were also deployed to the house, but the fire had been extinguished before they arrived.
Lightning struck a utility pole outside the back of the North Adams Regional Hospital around 13:37 EST, which sent an electrical surge throughout the hospital. This melted a wire in the electrical panel inside the hospital that controlled an elevator, making the elevator unserviceable.
A routine inspection during the morning of Saturday, December 26th resulted in the discovery of a landslide outside the west portal of the Hoosac Tunnel near North Adams. Eight inches of mud and stone had to be cleared from the rails, resulting in two freight trains being delayed. The cause was likely due to the heavy rains on Friday, December 25th.
Flash flooding was reported in North Adams as a result of heavy rainfall from thunderstorms. State Street was impassable due to flooding and was temporarily closed.
Flash flooding was reported on Church Street north of Adams as a result of heavy rainfall from thunderstorms. The force of flooding removed manhole covers off the road.
Flash flooding was reported in North Adams due to heavy rainfall from repeated thunderstorms. Several roads in the downtown portion of the city were closed due to the flooding.
Persistent moderate to heavy rainfall led to isolated flooding in portions of Berkshire County during the late morning and early afternoon hours of Tuesday September 11th. Flooding closed a portion of Massachusetts Route 2 in the town of Florida from 1143 LST to 1400 LST. In addition, several roads were closed in and around North Adams due to high water, including a portion of River Street, from Houghton Street to Brown Street, as well as a portion of Beaver Street and Mohawk Forest Boulevard. North Adams City firefighters also pumped water out of several private residences on Pleasant Street and State Road.||
Numerous large tree limbs and wires were reported down in and near North Adams due to strong thunderstorm winds. One downed large tree limb on Massachusetts Avenue in North Adams between Roberts Drive and Demond Avenue obstructed the road, reducing traffic to one lane.
No historic map-sheet match is published
for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs
a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary.
Browse the county's mapped places while that work is
pending.
Named in the fire insurance atlases
Sanborn surveyors printed an index of the
town's establishments at the front of each atlas. This property is named in
one, read straight off the scanned sheet.
When this property was proposed for the
National Register, someone wrote the case for it: what the building is,
and why it matters. That document is a federal record in the public domain.
It is quoted below word for word, never summarised. The text was read off the scanned case file by machine, so the
occasional stray character is the recogniser's and the 1970s
typewriter's.
Description of the property
The Freight Yard Historic District in North Adams lies just west of the Hadley Overpass and southwest of the Hoosac River. Turning south off Main Street on to the Curran Highway (Route 8) the road crosses the Boston and Maine railroad tracks by way of the Hadley Overpass. Before the overpass was built in 1940 the crossing was at grade level on State Street. Part of that red brick street still exists below the overpass. The freight yard area is reached by coming down off the south end of the overpass and taking the first right. About 125 feet further another right leads directly to the entrance of the area- There a three hundred foot driveway leads into a large open cobblestone courtyard. This is the center of the freight yard complex.
Starting about 150 feet down the driveway and continuing into the courtyard area there are three pitch-roofed, frame structures on the east side of the driveway, and a large pitch-roofed coal shed along the west side. On the northeast M side of the courtyard, at a 45' angle to the driveway, stands the 270 foot Boston and Maine Freighthouse. The cobblestone courtyard narrows to a road in the northwest corner and continues between two railroad sidings for four hundred feet before reaching the sixth structure in the freight yard area, a 24' x 175' barn-like storage building with pitched roofs. The historic district is quite isolated from the busy residential and commercial areas around it.
This wasn't true in the days before the Hadley Overpass when the group of three C frame buildings fronted on State Street.
The North Adams Freight Yard Historic District is pri- marily of local historic significance, for the railroad it served was crucial to the development of North Adams- It also has some regional significance in that it is closely linked with the Hoosac Tunnel, the rail connection with Boston and the West and the rapid, post Civil War industrial growth of North Adams and surrounding communities. North Adams was isolated from the rest of Massachusetts by the mountains to the east; the same mountains that blocked easy access to the West (Troy, Albany, etc.) from Boston. Prior to 1825 serious thought was given to a canal through Berkshire County (Hoosac and Deerfield Rivers) connecting Boston with the Hudson River.
In July of 1825 a survey of the Hoosac and Deerfield was actually carried out, that same year the first railroad in America was completed and the idea aot of a canal was abandoned in favor of plans for a rail connection. Before the building of railroads, North Adams was more a New York than a Massachusetts town, and the entire mercantile trade of North Adams was with Troy: but when the Boston and Albany R.R.
was completed (1842) it changed the condition of aflairs, for it passed through Pittsfield (1841), and thus brought North Adams within twenty miles of a thoroughfare to Boston, the metropolis of New England.1 In 1845 a committee was appointed in North Adams to confer with the directors of the Boston and Albany Railroad concern- ing the construction of a branch road from Pittsfield to North Adams. One year and$450,000.00 later the line was completed.
Quoted from the National Register nomination
for reference 72000131, 18 pages, held by the National Archives in Record
Group 79. See the
catalogue record.
Listed places nearby
6 within 8 miles
Other National Register properties close
enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both
positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties
to their map sheets.
Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.
Specimens. Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), https://www.gbif.org/. Only records licensed CC0 or CC BY are used. Records licensed CC BY-NC are excluded because this site carries advertising. Images are checked individually and any whose licence is non-commercial, no-derivatives or unreadable is refused.
Mines and quarries. USGS Mineral Resources Data System (MRDS) https://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105.
Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.
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