From the September 30, 2025  issue of the Springfield Reporter.

For those who are out of town a real time idea of what the weather is like in the Springfield area can be seen via this Dartmouth webcam.

This article from the August 26, 2020 issue of The Shopper may be of interest.

Springfield's Main Street Master Plan can be accessed by clicking on the picture below:

The following was included in the July 26, 2019 issue of a newsletter I receive on a daily basis. Food for thought.

Andrew Cockburn in Harper’s:

A generation ago, Seymour Melman, a professor of industrial engineering at Columbia, devoted much of his career to analyzing this very subject. He concluded that defense spending’s impact on the broader economy was wholly harmful, a consequence of the bad habits injected into the bloodstream of American manufacturing management by a defense culture indifferent to cost control and productivity.

The U.S. machine-tool industry, for example, had powered postwar U.S. manufacturing dominance thanks to its cost-effective productivity that in turn allowed high wage rates for workers. But, Melman wrote, as more and more of its output shifted to defense contracts, the industry’s relationship with the Pentagon…

became an invitation to discard the old tradition of cost minimizing. It was an invitation to avoid all the hard work… that is needed to offset cost increases. For now it was possible to cater to a new client, for whom cost and price increase was acceptable – even desirable.

In consequence, as Melman detailed, the U.S. machine-tool industry gradually ceased to compete effectively with nations such as Germany and Japan, where cost control still reigned supreme.

In this e-book the first full paragraph on the 17^th page through the paragraph on page 19 that ends on the 20^th page draws further on the work of Melman and others for additonal discussion of this topic.

A very interesting article about the rise and fall of the machine tool industry in Springfield was posted on FB by Jerry Dopp, class of '61 and Carolyn Dopp's brother. You can see it here.

Some pictures of old Springfield at the SAHS site.

Lots of Springfield history can be found here. Thanks to Judy Parker Turmail for bringing this to our attention.

Click here to visit a site dedicated to the Slack Shoddy Mill. At the tab "Bankruptcy of Mill" toward the bottom there is a list of employees at that time. You may recognize some of them.

Click here for pictures of Old Springfield.

An aerial view of downtown Springfield. Click on the thumbnail below to see a larger version.