How A Town Remembers
In the year 1915 the town of Hopkinton turned two hundred years old, and a woman named Frances A. Safford sat down to write its history. She did not write at great length. What she produced was a commemorative booklet, a brief history prepared for the bicentennial celebration, and it opened with a sentence that captures almost everything about how a New England town in that era understood its own past. To trace the history of even a small New England town, she wrote, shows that it is representative of the great type to which it belongs, a form of society and government unsurpassed by any the world has ever seen. She allowed, in the next breath, that the story might lack picturesqueness. But she insisted it possessed the interest that always attracts to an account of the doings of former generations of men who have lived and finished their work.
Safford was writing in the assured key of her age, sure that the town meeting and the white church on the common represented the high-water mark of human self-government. Her Hopkinton is a town of ministers and meeting houses and dutiful soldiers, and the people she counts most carefully are the ones who left records. She was doing something plainer and more durable than her own confident framing suggested, setting down what could be known before it slipped away, and she did it on the occasion the town had set aside for exactly that purpose. The two-hundredth anniversary was not only a party. It was an act of memory, and the booklet was its residue.
What Safford recorded reaches into nearly every earlier part of this story. She names the Edward Hopkins bequest and the investment of his money in land on the elevated ridge in 1710. She names the lease of that land to tenants at a penny an acre, and the eventual settlement with Harvard College for ten thousand dollars. She fixes the incorporation on the thirteenth of December, 1715, and the first town meeting under the charter on the twenty-fifth of March, 1724. She remembers the band of praying Indians that Eliot had gathered on the northern slope of Magunco Hill before 1669, and the sale of their lands to the trustees of the Hopkins legacy, and their joining with the Indians at Natick. She walks through the meeting houses and the fires that took them, through the schools and the dame schools and the samplers the girls stitched, through the taverns and the coffee house and the first small library. Set against the fuller record, Safford's booklet is a kind of index in prose, a town reciting its own story at the two-hundred-year mark and getting most of it right.
She got some of it in the voice of her time, which is to say she could be casual about things a later writer cannot. She notes, in a single clause, that the first minister kept slaves, that the rich sat forward in the meeting house and the poor in the rear and the children and the enslaved in the gallery. The facts are in her pages, set down without apology because in 1915 they raised no alarm, and a researcher who comes to the booklet now will find in it both the memory the town wished to keep and the things it kept without quite seeing them. That double quality is what makes an old anniversary text worth reading. It records the past, and it records the moment of remembering, and the two do not always agree.
A half century on, the town remembered itself again, and with considerably more noise than Safford's quiet booklet. The bicentennial summer of 1915 itself had already been marked, that July, by a massive parade, amateur athletic games, and oyster suppers that drew thousands over the holiday, the same season in which the graduates of every class of Hopkinton High School gathered to found the town's first alumni association, with a former teacher, Miss Aimee Phipps, presiding. The 1965 milestone matched it for spectacle: ten thousand people turned out that June for a firemen's parade and muster. The Hopkinton Historical Society holds the text of that 1965 anniversary commemoration alongside Safford's booklet, the two of them filed together as the society's record of how the town spoke of its own beginnings across the twentieth century. The arithmetic of these dates is worth pausing over. A town incorporated in 1715 marks its bicentennial in 1915 and its two hundred and fiftieth year in 1965, and that second milestone fell in a decade when the whole country was building toward the national bicentennial of 1976 and small towns everywhere were taking stock of their colonial origins. Hopkinton took its stock in 1965, and the document survived, and it sits now in the society's keeping where the next researcher can find it.
Then came 2015, and the three-hundredth year, and a celebration organized on a scale the earlier ones had not attempted. The town raised a dedicated committee for the occasion, the Hopkinton 300th Anniversary Celebration Committee, charged by the Board of Selectmen with planning and coordinating a full year of programming around the tercentennial mark counted from 1715. A companion body, organized independently, took on the fundraising the celebration required. Between them the two groups gathered histories and timelines and community events under a single banner, and they left behind a record of their own. The booklet of 1915, the text of 1965, the committees and their gatherings in 2015: every fifty years, Hopkinton has stopped and told itself who it has been, and each telling has left a deposit in the archive.
And the archive is the next part of the story, because a town that wishes to remember itself must keep the means of remembering. Hopkinton has built three institutions for that work, and they overlap in ways that reward a researcher who understands the division of labor among them.
The first is the Hopkinton Historical Society. It is the town's museum and its archive both, the place where the anniversary booklets are filed and where a long shelf of older material has been gathered over many years. The society holds manuscripts and photographs and the kinds of documents that a town accumulates and then, if it is lucky, does not throw away. It keeps the 1915 bicentennial text and the 1965 anniversary text on its own pages, and it keeps material connected to the three-hundredth anniversary as well, so that a person who wants to trace how the town has commemorated itself can do the whole circuit in one collection. The society has reached, in recent years, beyond paper. It has put history kiosks and history videos before the public, and it has lent some of its photographic holdings to the statewide digital library so that a researcher anywhere can call up streetscapes and buildings and faces from the town's past on a screen. Around a hundred and thirty photographs and several dozen postcards from the society's collection are findable that way, a window onto the mid-nineteenth and twentieth-century town that no booklet could provide. The subjects the collection returns to most often say something about what the town has valued keeping: schools and schoolchildren above everything else, then houses, then the ponds and lakes of the well-watered township, with the village of Woodville named far more often than any other corner of town and the Whitehall Reservoir close behind it.
The kind of recovery this institutional memory makes possible showed itself again in 2025, when descendants of Brigadier General Michael J. Lenihan came forward with a collection of his personal effects. Lenihan had been born in Hopkinton in 1865 and raised on a farm on Ash Street, and after West Point and service on the western frontier and in the Spanish-American War, he commanded the 83rd Infantry Brigade of the 42nd "Rainbow" Division on the Western Front in the First World War, fighting through the Aisne-Marne, St. Mihiel, Champagne, and Meuse-Argonne campaigns and earning the French Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre. In 1919 the citizens of Hopkinton had presented him with a loving cup in recognition of that service. More than a century later, his great-grandson Michael Greene, of Virginia, donated that same cup, along with a ceremonial sword, Lenihan's handwritten memoirs, and his presidential citations, to the Hopkinton Historical Society, which held a formal acceptance ceremony and public exhibition for the family and the town. A general born on an Ash Street farm, a war fought and mostly forgotten, and a cup kept somewhere in a family's keeping for a hundred years, all found their way back into the town's own record in a single year, which is as good a demonstration as any of what this kind of institution is for.
The Second World War left its own mark on the town, most visibly in the names of its own streets. James T. Downey bought a lakeside lot on Lake Maspenock in 1935, part of a development laid out two years earlier by William E. Schlusemeyer and originally recorded simply as A Street on the surveyor's plan. For a decade the Downey family kept a small summer camp there. Then, in the 5th Marine Division's assault on the black volcanic sand of Iwo Jima, Downey's son James B. Downey was killed. The street that ran past the family's old camp, along with the place beside it, was named Downey Street and Downey Place in his memory, and the names have stood ever since on a lakeshore that once knew him only as a boy home for the summer. Elsewhere in town, McNeil, McGill, and Cole Streets carry the names of other Hopkinton men who served in the same war, according to the Historical Society's own records. Not every Hopkinton family who sent a son to the Pacific lost him. Seven Marines with ties to the town served at Iwo Jima, and by one later accounting all seven came home, among them John Cahill, who remembered plainly what the island did to the men who survived it: young, green guys were turned into veterans after two days, if they lasted that long. Hopkinton keeps a memorial to that war on its own Common today, standing near the older doughboy statue raised for the war before it.
The century that followed carried two more Hopkinton names into wider American life, in fields far removed from war. Walter A. Brown was born in Hopkinton in 1905 and went on to found and own the Boston Celtics, own the Boston Bruins, and serve as president of the Boston Athletic Association from 1941 until his death in 1964, the very organization that had brought the marathon to the town's own road less than two decades before he took its presidency. He is buried in the cemetery of St. John the Evangelist, the same granite church the town's Irish community had built two generations before him. Richard J. Egan made his home in Hopkinton for many years while building EMC Corporation, which he founded in 1979 and grew into one of the largest technology companies in Massachusetts, later serving as United States Ambassador to Ireland from 2001 to 2003. He endowed the Hopkinton Technology for Education Foundation in the town where he had lived and raised his family. Neither man was born to the town's oldest names or its oldest families, and both left it, in their own way, permanently marked by their having passed through.
The second institution is the Hopkinton Public Library. Its roots reach back to 1867, when the Young Men's Christian Association gathered a library that served the public long after the association itself had faded, its early collection becoming the seed of the public library that was formally incorporated in 1890 and given a building of its own in 1895. Safford recorded that founding in her booklet, proud of a library she called one of the finest in the state, raised by the gifts of the old town's sons and daughters near and far. The library she described has grown into something her generation would recognize in spirit if not in scale. It keeps a local history room, a collection of manuscripts and photographs and newspapers and pamphlets and maps and artifacts gathered over many years and indexed in a finding aid prepared by a former archivist of the library. The room is not a place to wander freely. A researcher must arrange to use it, consulting a staff member by appointment, which is the ordinary discipline of a working archive and a sign that the material is valued enough to be guarded. The library has become, as of 2025, an affiliate of the genealogical service that opens additional records to those who come in person, and it has put images and land records and oral history videos within reach of anyone with a connection. The land records alone are a treasure, the deeds of Hopkinton and Upton from 1743 through 1833 made accessible from home, the raw paper on which the town's recorded past rests. Its own photograph collection, ninety-one images running from 1841 to 1945, points its lens a little differently than the Historical Society's does, dwelling less on schools and houses and more on the town's public face, its Main Street, its churches, its fire engines and firefighters, and a body of images reaching back into the Civil War years.
The third institution is the youngest, and in some ways the most consequential for the physical town. In 1969 Hopkinton established a Historical Commission, a municipal body charged with the keeping of the town's historic places. The commission maintains the inventory of the town's historically significant areas and buildings and sites, the working list of what is old and what is worth knowing about it. This is a different kind of memory from the booklet or the photograph. It is memory written onto the map and onto the buildings themselves, an effort to fix in the present record which barns and houses and burying grounds and stretches of the old town carry the weight of the past. The commission has also gathered oral histories on video, the voices of townspeople preserved against the day when they can no longer be asked, and those recordings sit alongside the library's holdings as one more layer in the town's accumulating memory of itself.
The inventory the commission maintains does not stay within the town's borders. It feeds upward into the state's own systems for keeping track of historic places, and a researcher who wants the fullest picture of inventoried and registered Hopkinton property must go to those systems directly. The Massachusetts Historical Commission runs a database known by the initials MACRIS, the cultural resource information system that holds inventory forms and National Register nomination papers for historic buildings and structures and areas and archaeological sites across the commonwealth. Hopkinton's inventoried resources live there, searchable by anyone, each form a small dossier on a particular old thing. Beyond the inventory lies the formal honor roll, the Massachusetts State Register of Historic Places, kept by the office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, which lists the properties and districts that have been formally registered at the state or national level. The inventory records what exists. The register records what has been officially recognized. A serious student of the town's surviving fabric needs both, and both are open.
So that is the apparatus of memory the town has built. An anniversary tradition that returns every fifty years. A historical society that holds the papers and the photographs and the commemorative texts. A public library with a local history room and a finding aid and a growing digital reach. A historical commission that keeps the inventory of the standing past and feeds it into the state registers. Together they answer a question that runs through the modern record, which is how a town keeps hold of itself once the founding generations are gone. Hopkinton's answer has been to institutionalize remembering, to make it the job of named bodies with charters and appointments and finding aids, so that memory does not depend on whether any single person happens to care.
The town these institutions serve is, in the present day, a settled suburb of greater Boston, described only in general and published terms, since living people are not named and present disputes are not entered into. The United States Census Bureau keeps a public summary of the town's population and housing and demographic figures in its QuickFacts service, the standard published baseline for any American community. Those figures show, as they show for the whole western arc of Boston's suburbs, a town that grew substantially across the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first, far larger now than the village of farms and small mills that the nineteenth-century atlases mapped. The QuickFacts page carries the current measure of the town, updated with each new count.
One thing about the modern town needs no census to establish, because the whole world sees it every spring. Hopkinton remains the official starting point of the Boston Marathon. The line fell on the town in 1924 for the plain reason of distance, and it has never moved. Each April the runners gather in the town before dawn, and the town's name goes out across the globe attached to a single road and a single morning, and then the runners leave and the town returns to its quiet. That is the one thread of the modern story that the records light fully, and it is fitting that the town's most famous fact is also its most public one, a thing done outdoors in front of everyone rather than filed away in an archive.
The deep past of the town comes down richly, through chronicles and deeds and vital records and atlases and the careful work of the archaeologists who dug Magunco Hill, and the marathon morning of 1924 comes down in the bright detail of a great newspaper's coverage. The town's modern centuries sit less fully documented, though not for lack of a place to look. The historical society holds papers on Hopkinton's later years. The library's local history room keeps a finding aid, and its land records run to nineteen volumes of deeds. The commission's inventory and the state's registers describe standing buildings whose individual histories remain to be written.
The town that remembers itself so carefully was founded upon a dispossession. The high upland where the rivers begin was Nipmuc country before it was anything else, and the praying town on Magunco Hill held it before the trustees of an English bequest bought it out from under its people and leased it to tenants at a penny an acre. Frances Safford recorded that sale in a single mild sentence in 1915, the way her generation recorded such things, as a transaction completed and settled. It was neither settled nor complete. The rivers that gave the town its height and its water and at last its famous starting line were running off that ridge before Hopkinton, or Massachusetts, or any English name for any of it, ever existed, and they are running off it still.