Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Westfield, MA

Westfield is a city in Hampden County, in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, and the 2020 census recorded its population as 40,834, with 15,887 households.

The area was originally inhabited by the Pocomtuc and was called Waranoke or Woronoco, meaning 'the winding land', and European settlers first settled there in 1660.

Westfield was incorporated as an independent town on May 19, 1669, and it was re-incorporated as a city on November 2, 1920, taking its name from being at the time the most westerly settlement.

From its founding until 1725, Westfield was the westernmost settlement in the Massachusetts Colony, and the Westfield River splits the city into a North Side and a South Side.

Westfield is nicknamed 'The Whip City' because in the 19th century it was a prominent center of the buggy whip industry, and its firms also produced bicycles, paper products, pipe organs, boilers and radiators, textile machinery, and precision tools.

The city has a total area of 47.31 square miles, of which 46.26 square miles is land, and it lies 10 miles west of Springfield and 95 miles west of Boston.

Westfield State University is in the city, and students comprise some 15 percent of Westfield's population, while the north side of the city developed into a warehousing center for corporations including C and S Wholesale, Home Depot, and Lowes.

In 1939 Westfield became the first city in Massachusetts, and in all of New England, to elect a female mayor, when Alice Burke defeated incumbent Raymond H. Cowing.

In the early 20th century Westfield was at the center of the Pure Food movement, and Louis B. Allyn, a Westfield resident and pure foods expert for McClure's Magazine, lived in Westfield until his murder, with Congress passing the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

Westfield is bordered on the east by linear cliffs of volcanic trap rock known as East Mountain and Provin Mountain, part of the Metacomet Ridge, and both mountains are traversed by the 114-mile Metacomet-Monadnock Trail.