The Turners Falls Bridge and Dam are two important structures on the Connecticut River. The dam was built in the late 18th century as part of a canal project that aimed to bypass the rapids at Great Falls, now known as Turners Falls. The canal, which ran along the east shore of the river, had ten locks and was used for transporting goods and passengers until the 1840s. The dam was rebuilt several times over the years and is now operated by FirstLight Power Resources. The bridge is a steel deck truss bridge that spans the river between the town of Gill and the village of Turners Falls. It was completed in 1938 and replaced an earlier iron bridge that was built in 1878. The bridge carries both automobile and pedestrian traffic and offers scenic views of the river and the dam.

Turners Falls is an unincorporated village in the town of Montague in Franklin County. Its name is generally used as a metonym for the entire town of Montague, for which it is the business district and comprises more than half the population.

The village has a total area of 2.3 square miles.

The village of Turners Falls was founded in 1868 as a planned industrial community according to the plan of Alvah Crocker, a prominent man from Fitchburg who envisioned in the immense power of the waterfalls the means of establishing a great city. Crocker was influenced by other, earlier and successful experiments in Lowell and elsewhere. Crocker’s vision was to attract industry to the town by offering cheap hydropower that was made by the harnessing of the Connecticut River, through the construction of a dam and canal. His development concept was to sell mill sites along the power canal to those companies and to sell individual building lots to mill workers who would come to work in the mills. The rest of the village was laid out in a horizontal grid pattern with cross streets numerically. Avenue A, the main commercial district, was designed as a grand tree-lined avenue.