Birth Of A Town
A town is born on paper before it is ever born in fact. On the thirteenth of December, 1715, the block of country that had been assembled became, in the eyes of the province, a town. It had a name by then, the name of a dead Connecticut governor who had never set foot on the ground and whose charity had paid for the founding acres. It had borders drawn around the eight hundred acres deeded by the Natick Indians two months earlier. What it did not have, on that December day or for a long while after, was anything a New England townsman would have recognized as a town. No selectmen. No town clerk. No constable to warn a meeting or collect a rate. The land was bought. The objection of the people who lived on it was written down and set aside. That much was settled. For years afterward, very nearly nothing else was.
William Richard Cutter's Historic Homes and Places of Middlesex County (1908), which preserves the town's earliest civil history, is direct about the gap. Hopkinton was incorporated in 1715, it states, and the first town meeting was held in 1724. Nine years passed in which the town existed on parchment and did not assemble, did not vote, did not choose a single officer from among its own inhabitants. Cutter explains how the place was run in the interval. The town, he writes, seems to have been under the direction of a committee of trustees, with no selectmen or other town officers between those two dates. The men who had bought the land also ran it. The Hopkins trustees, the same body of Boston gentlemen who had pried the legacy loose from the courts and laid out the money in acres, held the new town in their own hands, not unlike a ward not yet come of age. They settled tenants on it, collected what was owed, and made the decisions a town would ordinarily make for itself, while the inhabitants had no recorded voice in any of it.
That committee of trustees was not the modern picture of a board with minutes and a meeting room. These were the successors to the men who had brought the original suit in the English courts, charged by the terms of Edward Hopkins's will with one overriding duty: to make the legacy earn an income for the scholars and books at Cambridge. They were administrators of a charity, not founders of a town, and they came to Hopkinton thinking first about rents. The land had to produce, and producing meant settling it with people who would clear it and farm it and pay for the privilege. So the trustees parceled it out, wrote the terms, and kept the management in their own hands until the place was peopled and orderly enough to be let go. For nine years a New England town was run, in effect, by a property committee answerable to a dead man's will and to the college that benefited from it, an arrangement none of the neighboring towns shared.
Most New England towns came into being the other way around. People settled first, cleared and built and married and buried, and after some years of doing all that at an inconvenient distance from the nearest meetinghouse, petitioned to be set off as a town of their own. Incorporation came as recognition of a community that already existed in fact. The town followed the people. Hopkinton ran the opposite course. The corporation came first, struck off in a single legal act, and the community had to grow up inside it afterward, slowly, on land that belonged, in the deepest sense, to a charitable fund rather than to the families who worked it. The trustees were landlords before they were anything else. Hopkinton in its first nine years was less a self-governing town than an estate carrying a town's name. The settlers who took up the trustees' acres came as tenants, not proprietors in the usual sense, and that distinction would shadow the town for the better part of a century. The men who held the title and the men who held the plow were not the same men, and the law had arranged things so the holders of the title held the upper hand.
Still the people came, because land was land and cheap rent was a price a working family could reach.
What that rent bought, and what it did not, is worth weighing, because the affordability of the land was both the town's making and the seed of its long trouble. Cheap rent put a farm within reach of a man with very little money, and that is no small thing. It meant a younger son with no inheritance, or a laborer with a strong back and a growing family and no prospect of land in the crowded east, could come to Hopkinton and hold acreage enough to feed his people and perhaps a little to spare. But the rent, whatever its rate in a given year, was rent and not purchase, and that difference is the whole hinge of the matter. A man who pays rent, however small, does not own. He holds his farm at the pleasure of the lease terms, terms written by a charity that meant to draw an income from his labor for as long as the lease ran. The improvements he made, the stones he pulled, the orchard he set, the house he framed, all of it raised the value of land that was not finally his. In the seventeen-twenties and the years just after, none of this pressed very hard. The reckoning would come later, when the ninety-nine-year leases neared their term and the value of a Hopkinton farm and the smallness of the rent the trustees received fell wildly out of line. The same arrangement which peopled the town also planted, quietly and at the very start, the dispute that would trouble it for generations.
The arrangement bound this town to a college sixty miles away in a way no neighboring town shared. The income from Hopkinton's leased acres did not stay in Hopkinton. By the very terms that had created the fund, the rents the tenants paid flowed east to Cambridge, to support poor scholars in the grammar and divinity schools there and to buy books for deserving students at Harvard College. The labor of a Hopkinton farmer, clearing his stony lot and paying his rent, fed a charity that served young men he would likely never meet at an institution he would likely never see. That was the design from the day the trustees bought the land. It set up a relationship between Hopkinton and the Hopkins fund less like a town and its founders than a tenantry and a distant landlord whose purposes had nothing to do with the place itself. The later quarrel over the leases, when it came, grew bitter in large part because the town had always been producing wealth that was, by original intention, meant to leave it. That intention was honest and even generous in its way, the dying wish of a pious man who valued learning. But it meant Hopkinton was founded as a source of income for others, and a town founded on that footing carries the arrangement in its bones for a long time.
In the Massachusetts of that century the town meeting was the whole engine of local life. It was where the freeholders gathered to lay the rates that paid for everything the town did, where they chose the men who would carry out the year's business, where they voted whether to build a road or repair a bridge or raise a meetinghouse and how much to spend on each. It was, in the plainest sense, the way a community governed itself, and a town that held no meeting was a community in name only, dependent on someone else's judgment for the ordering of its common affairs. The settlers on the trustees' land had no such voice in those first nine years. If a road was wanted they could not vote it. If a rate was laid, it was laid for them and not by them. That is the deprivation the bare fact of the missing officers conceals.
In 1724, after nine years under the trustees' direction, the inhabitants of Hopkinton met at last and governed themselves. The account of that first town meeting is spare, but it preserves the essential thing, the moment the town took its own affairs into its own hands. At that meeting, Cutter states, the town chose five selectmen, and one of the selectmen was elected town clerk. Five selectmen meant Hopkinton had decided to run itself the way every other Massachusetts town ran itself, by the votes of its assembled freeholders and the labor of officers drawn from their own number. A town clerk meant that from this point forward the town would keep its own book, setting down its own births and marriages and deaths and votes and debts in its own hand, rather than being administered from outside like a piece of property. After 1724 there was a continuous local record because there was, at last, someone whose duty it was to keep one.
Those five men took on a great deal. A selectman in an eighteenth-century Massachusetts town was the working hand of the whole community, charged with the ordinary management of its affairs between meetings: laying out roads, overseeing the poor, warning new arrivals, and the hundred small administrative chores that keep a town running. Five was a common number for the work, enough to share the load and check one another, and Hopkinton's choice of five put it in step with the towns around it. The clerk's office, handed to one of the five, was the office of memory. He kept the book. Every vote the town passed, every birth and marriage and death the families reported, every rate and every officer chosen went down in his hand and became the town's record of itself. It is precisely because the office was created in 1724 that the town's documented life as a community begins where it does. The vital records printed nearly two centuries later rest in large part on the books that he and his successors faithfully kept.
The record stops exactly where curiosity sharpens most. There were five selectmen, and the source that preserves the fact of the election does not preserve the men, so the first board of Hopkinton's selectmen stands in the record as a number and nothing more. The same holds for the first town clerk, filled at that first meeting from among the five. Those five men remain anonymous unless the town's own earliest records are laid open more fully than they have been here.
Hopkinton's first meeting did not happen in isolation. The seventeen-twenties were a season of town-making across this part of Massachusetts. The same year Hopkinton finally met, 1724, the neighboring settlement of Holliston was cut loose from Sherborn and incorporated as a town of its own, after years in which its families had complained of the long Sabbath journey to a distant meetinghouse. All across the interior the same pattern was unfolding, parishes hardening into towns, scattered settlements reaching the numbers and confidence to govern themselves. Hopkinton was part of that wave, though it had come to it by a stranger road than most. Where Holliston's people had settled first and petitioned afterward in the ordinary way, Hopkinton had been a corporation looking for inhabitants. By 1724 the result was much the same. The town met, chose its officers, and took its place among the self-governing communities of the region.
There is a further wrinkle in the founding dates.
Not every source agrees that Hopkinton was incorporated in 1715. Cutter's account, which gives the December date and the nine-year gap, is firm and internally consistent. But D. Hamilton Hurd's History of Worcester County, Massachusetts (1889), in its chapter on Natick, tells the story differently. The territory acquired from the Indians, together with lands lying west of it, was incorporated in 1724 into a township called Hopkinton, Hurd writes. There, the incorporation and the first meeting fall together, and the long interval of trustee management does not appear at all. Two respectable nineteenth-century authorities, then, give two different answers to the simplest question that can be asked of a town, which is when it began.
Cutter distinguishes carefully between the legal act that created the town in 1715 and the first town meeting in 1724, treating them as separate events divided by nine years of trustee management. Hurd uses a single word, incorporated, to cover both steps at once, collapsing the gap and leaving the impression that the legal birth and the first public meeting arrived together. Both accounts likely have their facts right. They simply choose different facts to name, which is the ordinary condition of a historical record built from more than one hand. A town was created in December of 1715 by an act of the provincial legislature. That town first governed itself, in the way of a New England town, in 1724. Between those two dates the trustees of Edward Hopkins held the management, set the terms, collected the rents, and did the work that in any other town the inhabitants would have done for themselves. The nine years between those dates were nine years of a town that existed in law before it existed in fact, a shape the thing had to take when a charity founded a town instead of a community founding itself.