Florida is a town in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, United States. It is part of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area. It is home to the east portal of the Hoosac Tunnel, as well as Whitcomb Summit (elevation 2,172 ft or 662 m), the highest point of the Mohawk Trail. Florida contains the village of Drury. At the 2010 census the town had a total population of 752.

Most of what is now Florida was originally a grant to the town of Bernardston, Massachusetts made sometime before 1771. The first settler, Dr. Daniel Nelson, arrived around 1783. The town was incorporated in 1805 and named "Florida", perhaps because Spanish Florida was a topic of conversation at the time.

The town was mostly agrarian, with maple syrup, wool, and potatoes its main products for many years. However, in the mid-nineteenth century, the town was a boom town for the workers involved in the construction of the Hoosac Tunnel, a rail tunnel which begins on the town's eastern border and extends through the Hoosac Range to neighboring North Adams.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his American Notebooks, names the town as Lebrida, not Florida, and speaks of the Hoosac Range as "the Green Mountain" in the singular. It is possible that the name Lebrida was a corruption of Florida; or the other way around. While the reference to "the Green Mountain" evidently reflects local tradition of the time (1838), and may in fact be what gave the name Green Mountains to the entire range, as another mountain in Vermont also bears the name Green Mt. Today the town is sparsely populated, with most residents working in neighboring towns.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 24.6 square miles (63.7 km²), of which 24.4 square miles (63.1 km²) is land and 0.23 square miles (0.6 km²), or 0.93%, is water.

...
Wikipedia