Extreme Model Railroad and Contemporary Architecture Museum

The North Adams Museum of History and Science is located on State Street in North Adams, Massachusetts as part of Western Gateway Heritage State Park. The building it inhabits was originally built in 1880 as a coal distribution center. The museum, however, was established by the North Adams Historical Society in 1988.The first floor of the museum contains exhibits on the Industrial Revolution, and its effects on what became an industrial center during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This exhibit displays machine parts and goods of some of the major manufacturing companies in the town during this era: Hunter Machine Company, Arnold Printworks and Sprague Electric. This floor also contains artifacts that depict farming, education, and home life during this era. One can find a children’s room, North Adams school paraphernalia, city uniforms, and household objects. The second floor is particularly notable for its Freight Yard exhibit. A moving train set has been constructed to model the town of North Adams and its train system. In this room there are also exhibits on immigration, which highlights French, Lebanese, Welsh, Italian, Jewish, Irish, and Chinese immigration to the area; religion, mainly by showing the churches that have been built in North Adams; and ballooning. In an adjacent room exist displays on flora and fauna, geography (containing a topographical map of this area of the Berkshires), and a kids’ room relating to flora and fauna of the area. Finally, the third floor is centered on political and military history of the area. It contains a voting machine from the nineteenth century, information on past mayors of North Adams, information on military heroes of the area, and Native American artifacts of those who inhabited the area before the settlers. There is also a side room dedicated to Fort Massachusetts, an English fort in North Adams during the French and Indian War. Finally, there is also a blacklight gallery that is used as a display of the Solar System. The museum’s hours are Saturday 10AM-4PM and Sunday 1-4PM November through April, and Thursday through Saturday 10AM-4PM and Sunday 1-4PM May through October. The museum is closed on holidays.

Western Gateway Heritage State Park is 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 is located in a former railyard, tell the story of the creation of the Hoosac Tunnel. The freight yard was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 as the Freight Yard Historic District.

The Monument Square–Eagle Street Historic District is a historic district encompassing the civic heart of North Adams, Massachusetts. When it was originally designated in 1972, the district encompassed Monument Square – west of the intersection of Main Street and Church Street, and the location of a Civil War memorial – and the area around it. This designation included the North Adams Public Library (formerly the Blackinton Mansion), the First Baptist Church and First Congregational Church, and a block of shops Eagle Street. In 1988, the district's boundaries were increased to be roughly bounded by Holden, Center and Union Streets, the East Middle School (now the Silvio O. Conte Middle School), Summer Street, and Main Street. This expansion extended the district westward along Summer Street to include the US Post Office building and St. John's Church, and eastward to include Colgrove Park, the middle school, and St. Francis Catholic Church. An additional block of commercial buildings was also added on the north side of West Main Street, extending just west of Holden Street.North Adams was settled as part of Adams in the mid-18th century, and soon developed as an industrial village, powered by the waters of the two branches of the Hoosic River, which meet just northwest of its central business district. The waterfront areas were developed with mills producing a variety of goods, which were eventually dominated by textiles beginning in the mid-19th century. The central business district around Monument Square, were the town's Baptist Church was founded in 1808, led by Otis Blackinton, whose family would dominate the local industrial business landscape. Most of the city's business district was developed between about 1870 and 1920, the greatest period of its economic success. A major decline was begun by the Great Depression, resulting in little growth in subsequent decades.

North Adams is a city in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, United States. It is part of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area. Its population was 12,961 as of the 2020 census. Best known as the home of the largest contemporary art museum in the United States, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams has in recent years become a center for tourism, culture and recreation.

Joe Wolfe Field is a baseball field in North Adams, Massachusetts, United States. The field is home to the North Adams SteepleCats of the New England Collegiate Baseball League, a collegiate summer baseball league based in New England. The park was built in 1986, with the SteepleCats first utilizing the facility at their inception in the 2002 NECBL season. It has a seated capacity of 1,800 spectators, with additional seating and standing areas located down either foul line. The dimensions of the field are 325 ft. down the lines, 358 ft. in the gaps, and 385 ft. in dead center field. The park faces south in the Noel Field Athletic Complex. The field is lighted for night play with 8 light poles.In 2012, the Division III MCLA Trailblazers baseball team of the nearby Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts played three home games at Joe Wolfe Field. The facility is also used by the baseball teams of Drury High School and Charles H. McCann Technical High School, both located in North Adams. Joe Wolfe Field also hosts other youth sports leagues.

Sprague Electric Company was an electronic component maker founded by Robert C. Sprague in 1926. Sprague was best known for making a large line of capacitors used in a wide variety of electrical and electronic in commercial, industrial and military/space applications. Other products include resistive components, magnetic components (transformers and coils), filter assemblies, semiconductors and integrated circuits.

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) is a museum in a converted Arnold Print Works factory building complex located in North Adams, Massachusetts. It is one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art and performing arts in the United States. Built by the Arnold Print Works, which operated on the site from 1860 to 1942, the complex was used by the Sprague Electric company before its conversion. MASS MoCA originally opened with 19 galleries and 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) of exhibition space in 1999. It has expanded since, including the 2008 expansion of Building 7 and the May 2017 addition of roughly 130,000 square feet when Building 6 was opened.In addition to housing galleries and performing arts spaces, it also rents space to commercial tenants. It is the home of the Bang on a Can Summer Institute, where composers and performers from around the world come to create new music. The festival, started in 2001, includes concerts in galleries for three weeks during the summer. Starting in 2010, MASS MoCA has become the home for the Solid Sound Music Festival. MASS MoCA, along with the Clark Art Institute and the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), forms a trio of significant art museums in the northern Berkshires.

The North Adams strike (also called North Adams Scandal) was a strike in 1870 by shoe workers of the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin, against Calvin T. Sampson's Shoe factory, in North Adams, Massachusetts. The strike itself was broken when the factory superintendent, George W. Chase, fired the Irish workers, replacing them with newly employed seventy-five Chinese men from California. Bringing national attention to North Adams, the event started a nation-wide trend of bringing in scab labor and helped perpetuate the concept of immigrants coming to the United States to steal jobs, which led to much hostility towards Chinese immigrants across the nation.

The H. W. Clark Biscuit Company is a former industrial complex in North Adams, Massachusetts. The bakery that Herbert W. Clark built at this site began at a facility on Liberty Street, and expanded into a shoe factory building (demolished in 1929) that Clark had operated with a partner. When the Liberty Street plant was destroyed by fire in 1913, Clark placed its employees on a second shift in the shoe factory building, and had the building now called the Icing Building constructed. This building was built in a style reminiscent of mills built in North Adams fifty years earlier, and is still sometimes thought to be an older building.In addition to the Icing Building, Clark in 1913 built a Boiler House, which was attached to a warehouse formerly associated with the shoe business (and is the oldest surviving building on the property, dating to 1884). In 1922 Clark embarked on an ambitious modernization of the facility, constructing the Baking Building out of reinforced concrete to a design by New York architect William Higginson. It was the first reinforced concrete building in the city.Clark sold the business in 1928 after his health began to fail. His successors operated the bakery until 1954. The buildings underwent a series of ownership changes, but were used for nearly forty years by the Tartan Machine Company. That business vacated the premises in 1990. After being vacant for two decades, the property was rehabilitated and converted to residential use. The complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.

The siege of Fort Massachusetts (19-20 August 1746) was a successful siege of Fort Massachusetts (in present-day North Adams, Massachusetts) by a mixed force of more than 1,000 French and Native Americans from New France. The fort, garrisoned by a disease-weakened militia force from the Province of Massachusetts Bay, surrendered after its supplies of ammunition and gunpowder were depleted. Thirty prisoners were taken and transported back to Quebec, where about half of them died in captivity.

Fort Massachusetts See also Fort Massachusetts for other similarly named forts. Fort Massachusetts was the westernmost in a line of forts built by British colonists to protect the northern border of Massachusetts from French and Indian forces in 1745. It was constructed along the banks of the Hoosac River in what is currently North Adams, Massachusetts by a company of British soldiers led by Captain Ephraim Williams. It consisted of a wooden stockade with a guard tower at each corner and a central blockhouse which was designed to be defensible if the walls were breached.

St. Joseph's School is a historic former school building located at 85 Eagle Street at the intersection of Union Street in North Adams, Massachusetts. It is a 3+1⁄2-story brick Classical Revival structure, built, in 1928–29 as an expansion of an older building. It was operated by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield, and reached a peak enrollment over 1,200 students in 1958. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. It is now called St. Joseph's Court and is used for federally subsidized low-income housing for senior citizens.