The South Deerfield, Massachusetts, station of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad (NY, NH & H) followed a building pattern that was used throughout the system. This station was on one of the line’s northernmost branches that terminated in Turners Falls some twenty miles north of South Deerfield. The station was destroyed in a violent windstorm during World War II. The NY, NH & H was founded in 1872, with the merging of the New York & New Haven and the Hartford & New Haven railroads. The railroad began purchasing other railroads and by 1900, it had absorbed some 25 other lines. The management hoped that this aggressive expansion would make the NY, NH & H the sole railroad in New England, particularly after it was acquired by J.P. Morgan in 1900. However, there were places where the railroad’s aggressiveness made very little sense. For example, by the 1890s Western Massachusetts was served by two major railroads, the NY, NH & H and the Boston & Maine, which ran parallel to each other and in some places were less than a mile apart.

This photograph comes from the Howes Brothers collection of photographs.  Based in Ashfield, Massachusetts, they created more than 20,000 images of New England rural life from 1890 to around 1910.