By the time English people began settling in the Connecticut River Valley, people of the Pocumtuck Nation, their numbers greatly reduced by smallpox, had left the outlying area around present-day Buckland and consolidated into several villages in the rich river valleys.

In 1735 the English obtained title to the outlying land from Pocumtucks living in Schaghticoke, near Albany, New York. The General Court of Massachusetts then allocated three townships to Boston. The land that is now Buckland lay in Boston Township No. 1. When English people starting settling on that land in the 1750s, it was part of Charlemont, which became an incorporated town in 1765.

Travel to Charlemont’s town center was time-consuming, and in 1779 those settlers, whose numbers had grown, were granted their petition to make a town of Buckland. Agriculture formed the heart of the town’s early industry, although there were also some mills.

In 1797 Mary Lyon (1797-1849), founder of Mount Holyoke College, the first women’s college in the United States, was born in Buckland. She was educated in the town’s schools and from 1824 to 1830 she ran her own school in Buckland for young women.

In 1850 a manufacturing center started to develop on Buckland’s east border, at the falls on the Deerfield River, when the Lamson & Goodnow cutlery manufacturing firm located there to harness the ready waterpower. The village surrounding the river, known as Shelburne Falls, was part of Buckland on the river’s west bank and part of the town of Shelburne on the east. The Shelburne Falls section of Buckland eventually became the town’s most densely populated area, and the rest of Buckland remained overwhelmingly agricultural well into the 1950s.