Looking west from the summit of Mount Holyoke toward Northampton, around 1900. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.
The scene in 2015:
Not a whole lot has changed in this scene in the past 115 years. From this distance, there aren’t too many noticeable changes in the city of Northampton, which has grown in population by more than 50% since 1900. The area near the river has hardly changed at all; this floodplain continues to be used as farmland. Even Interstate 91, which passes through between the farms and the city, isn’t noticeable in the present-day scene. In fact, the only really obvious difference here is something that is entirely natural – the island that has formed in the middle of the Connecticut River.