Drawing The Lines
On a stony upland just over the southwest line of Hopkinton, sometime around 1728, a man named Matthew Taft bought himself a farm. He bought it, of all parties, from Harvard College. The land lay in rough country where the outlands of four towns ran together and nobody had yet drawn a firm line through them, and the deed that put it in Taft's hands came from a college sixty miles to the east that had never plowed an acre of it. The town's borders in those first years were not the clean, fixed thing the word border usually suggests. They were a loose set of edges, claimed and leased and disputed, with the Hopkins fund holding great blocks of it on paper and settlers like Taft pushing in along the margins where the towns had not yet decided whose ground was whose. Taft was a settler on that frontier as early as 1728, and the territory he settled into would not stay part of any of its parent towns for long. Within seven years it would be cut loose and given a name of its own.
Hopkinton was not born with the shape it wears on a modern map, and it did not keep the shape it was given at its founding. Over the better part of a century and a quarter the town surrendered territory twice, once to the south and once to the east, and each surrender pared it down toward the outline a traveler would recognize today. The first piece went in 1735 to a brand-new town called Upton. The second went in 1846 to a brand-new town called Ashland. Hopkinton's form is best understood by what it gave away.
Start with Upton, because it came first and because the records of it are unusually full.
The country that became Upton was a stretch of high, broken land south and west of Hopkinton, the sort of ground D. Hamilton Hurd described without flattery in his History of Worcester County, Massachusetts (1889) as not specially attractive in soil or scenery, abounding in rocky hills with here and there a plain of better land. West River drained it, working its way down through the meadows toward the Blackstone at Uxbridge. It was not rich country, but it was settling country, and by the seventeen-thirties enough families had pushed into it to make the old arrangement intolerable. The settlers lived too far from any meetinghouse. Their land lay in the outlands of four separate towns, Mendon and Sutton and Uxbridge and Hopkinton, and on a Sabbath morning a family on that upland faced a long and miserable journey to whichever distant church their corner of the wilderness happened to belong to. People will endure a great deal, but they will not endure being permanently strangers to their own worship, and so they did what frontier people across Massachusetts were doing in those years. They petitioned to be set off.
According to Hurd's History of Worcester County, Massachusetts (1889), the petition went up to the Provincial Court on the thirty-first of January, 1735, and the name at the head of it was John Hazeltine.
Hazeltine is the human thread that runs through the whole founding of Upton, since the part of Hopkinton that left in 1735 left in his company. He was one of the principal inhabitants of the new territory, a man with land and standing among the scattered families of the uplands, and it was he and others living on that ground who carried the request to the General Court. Their language was plain. They asked to be set off a distinct and separate township, on the grounds that the outlands of the several towns were completely filled with inhabitants who labored under difficulties by reason of their remoteness from the places of public worship. Behind that dry legal phrasing stands a whole community of people who had cleared farms in a hard country and wanted, before anything else, a church they could reach.
The court agreed. On the fourteenth of June, 1735, it passed an act for dividing the towns of Mendon, Sutton, Uxbridge and Hopkinton and erecting a new town in the County of Worcester by the name of Upton.
The act is precise in a way that rewards a close look, because it shows exactly how a piece of one town becomes part of another. The new township was assembled out of the outlands of all four parent towns, and the surveyors who drew its bounds did so the old way, by perch and by compass bearing, walking the line from one natural mark to the next. Per the incorporating act as reproduced in Hurd's history, the whole tract came to twelve thousand nine hundred and forty-three acres, with another hundred and fifty-one acres taken off the farm of one John Rockwood and folded in. The bounds began at a pine tree at the southeast corner of Grafton and ran north along Grafton, then turned by the Westboro line until it met the Hopkinton line. From there the line ran on. From that meeting point the survey ran southerly two hundred and twelve perch in the bounds between Sutton and Hopkinton, then south nine degrees east four hundred and ninety perch to a stake and a heap of stones, and on by a chain of bearings and stone heaps and meadows down toward a place called North Pond and the Mill River that ran out of it. Somewhere along that careful line of perches and stones a portion of Hopkinton was lifted out of the town and set into Upton.
One fine human touch survives buried in the surveyor's bearings, the kind of thing the old deeds preserve without meaning to. At one corner the line ran north along the Uxbridge bound ten hundred and twenty-two perch to a heap of stones at Hazeltine's goat pasture. The petitioner's own goats, it seems, grazed right on the edge of the new town he had asked the court to make. A man's livestock became a survey marker, and so John Hazeltine's name was written into the very metes and bounds of Upton, not once in the petition but again in the stones.
When the act had passed, the court did not simply leave the new town to find its own feet. It named a man to set the machinery going, and the man it named was Hazeltine again. By an order of court he was authorized, as one of the principal inhabitants of the new town, to notify and warn the inhabitants to meet and choose their town officers. The day appointed was the eighth of August, 1735, and on that day the people of Upton gathered to govern themselves for the first time. They met at the house of John Sadler, one of the settlers, because there was as yet no meetinghouse to gather in. They chose John Hazeltine moderator. They chose Jonathan Wood clerk and Samuel Work treasurer. The man who had carried the petition, drawn his own goats into the survey, and warned the first meeting now stood in front of his neighbors' first assembly as its presiding officer.
The condition of Upton's earliest records is poor, a limitation Hurd's History of Worcester County, Massachusetts (1889) acknowledges as well. One small and human sequel is known. Samuel Work, the first treasurer, died not long after his election, and on the tenth of November the town chose Jonathan Wood to take up the office in his place. The first year of a town's life, then, included its first funeral among the men it had just chosen to lead it.
The piece of Hopkinton that went into Upton was not a random corner. It carried with it a thread of the town's deepest entanglement, the Hopkins fund itself. The whole territory of Upton, by the old reckoning, came to thirteen thousand and ninety-four acres, and a portion of it, something on the order of three thousand acres, had formed part of the tract belonging to the Hopkins fund. This is the same charitable estate that had bought the Magunkaquog lands and given Hopkinton its founding acreage and its founding troubles, and a slice of it now passed out of Hopkinton entirely and into the new town to the south. The disputes over rent and lease that would dog Hopkinton for generations did not stop politely at the new town line. Upton inherited a portion of the same trouble along with the same soil, and both towns would spend decades wrestling with the trustees and the ninety-nine-year leases before the Legislature finally brought a resolution in the eighteen-thirties.
So much for the south. The first carving took its perches and its stones and its goat pasture and its share of the Hopkins lands, and when it was done Hopkinton was a smaller town than it had been that morning. More than a century would pass before the second carving came, and when it came it took from the opposite side of the town and cut deeper into Hopkinton's own beginnings than the first had.
The second set-off created Ashland, and it happened in 1846.
By the eighteen-forties the eastern edge of Hopkinton, the part nearest Framingham and Holliston, had grown into something the old town center could no longer easily hold. A village had risen there, gathered around water-power and the mills it turned, and it bore the hopeful name of Unionville. It sat at the meeting of three towns, drawing population and trade out of the corners of Framingham and Holliston and Hopkinton alike, and like the upland settlers of Upton a hundred and ten years before, its people came at last to feel they belonged together more than they belonged to the scattered towns whose edges they occupied. The remedy was the old remedy. They petitioned to be set off, and after one of the three parent towns, Holliston, initially objected, the legislature voted to incorporate the new town anyway. Governor George N. Briggs signed the act, and it became effective on the sixteenth of March, 1846.
The new town, the Ashland Historical Society's own account and a modern historic properties survey both confirm, encompassed thirteen square miles and 8,311 acres in total, drawn from its three parent towns in close to the proportions their own borders had shaped: about 43 percent from Framingham, 36 percent from Hopkinton, and 21 percent from Holliston. That works out to something on the order of three thousand acres of Hopkinton's own territory passing into the new town.
The piece of Hopkinton that went into Ashland was the old praying-town ground. It was Magunkaquog.
The eastern part of Hopkinton, the part that became Ashland, had been from soon after 1669 the seventh of the old praying towns, the place where the Christian Indians gathered under the mission of John Eliot, where they had been taught to make cedar shingles and clapboards with more skill, Cutter's account says, than the English showed. It was on that ground that the eleven families and the fifty-odd souls of Gookin's report had lived, partly within the bounds of Natick and partly on lands granted by the county. It was that very tract, with the lands lying west of it, that the Hopkins trustees had bought from the Natick Indians and that the General Court had folded into the township of Hopkinton at its founding. D. Hamilton Hurd, writing of the lands the Natick handed over in his History of Worcester County, Massachusetts (1889), set the matter down without ceremony. The territory handed over, he wrote, constitutes at this time portions of Hopkinton and Ashland. The ground where the first settled people of this place had lived did not stay in Hopkinton. In 1846 it passed out of the town altogether and into Ashland, where Magunco Hill stands to this day.
The land that gave Hopkinton its founding acreage, its name's whole reason, and its first inhabitants was the land Hopkinton eventually gave away. The town kept the name of the dead governor whose charity had bought the Indians' hill. The hill itself it surrendered to a younger neighbor.
One further loss attended the new town, though it fell on Ashland rather than on Hopkinton. The very water-power that had drawn the village of Unionville together and given it the strength to become a town was, in time, taken away from it, when the growing city of Boston reached out decades later to claim the privileges of the Sudbury River watershed for its own water supply. The mills that made the place were undone, in part, by the thirst of the city to the east. That same reach for water would touch Hopkinton's own ground before the century was out, when the growing city's thirst for water reached past Ashland and into the town's own reservoirs.
With Ashland set off, the great carvings were done. The town had given its southern outland to Upton and its eastern praying-ground to Ashland, and what remained was, in its rough outline, the Hopkinton of the modern map. But an outline is not the same as a fixed and certain line, and the work of turning the one into the other ran on for another two generations after Ashland left.
A town boundary in nineteenth-century Massachusetts was a living thing that had to be tended. The old practice was the boundary walk, the periodic walking of the line by officers of the adjoining towns, who would meet at the bounds and pace them out together and renew the marks, the stone heaps and stakes and witness trees, so the line would not be lost or quarreled over. Hopkinton's neighbors did this work as a matter of course, and the records of the surrounding towns are dotted with the renewals of boundary lines, the line between Holliston and Hopkinton and Medway being run and reaffirmed in the ordinary way as the years required. It was unglamorous work, two parties of selectmen tramping a property line on a spring morning, but it was the work that kept a town's edges honest, and it went on quietly through all the decades the set-offs did not touch.
That final settling came in the early years of the twentieth century, when the Commonwealth set itself to surveying and publishing the boundaries of its towns with a thoroughness the old perambulators could only have dreamed of. The result, for this town, was the Atlas of the Boundaries of the Town of Hopkinton, prepared under the authority of the state. It is a plain and official document, all survey lines and bearings and descriptions, and it carries none of the drama of a petition or the poignancy of a lost hill. But it stands as the final word on Hopkinton's boundaries. The boundaries that John Hazeltine's goats once helped to mark, that the act of 1735 ran out in perches and stone heaps, that the creation of Ashland redrew in 1846, were at last gathered into a single authoritative survey and fixed in the form the town still holds. The carving was over. The line had stopped moving. What had begun as the loose and contested edges of a corporation looking for inhabitants had become, after nearly two centuries, the settled outline of a town.
A simple shape emerges from the documents. Hopkinton was largest at its founding and grew smaller twice, and both times it grew smaller by the same human logic that had made the towns around it. People settled in a corner, found themselves too far from the center to belong to it, and asked to be set off and made whole somewhere nearer to themselves. Upton's uplanders did it in 1735 and took a slice of the Hopkins lands south with them. Unionville's mill families did it in 1846 and took the old praying-ground east with them. In between, and long after, the surveyors walked and renewed and at last fixed the line those departures had left. The town that remained was the country in the middle, the part that stayed, bounded now by the towns its own former territory had helped to make.