Rails And Reservoirs
There is a kind of change that arrives without anyone in the town quite noticing it, no crowd at the depot, no bell rung from the meetinghouse, no entry in the family Bible. A rail line inches closer year by year until one morning it simply runs through the middle of things. A pond behind a mill dam rises a few feet and never falls back. Nothing in the fields has visibly shifted overnight, and yet something has changed that will outlast every shoe factory in the county, because it changes how the town moves and how it works.
Two such changes came to Hopkinton in the decades on either side of the middle of the nineteenth century, and unlike the county's boundaries, which had settled into their lasting shape well before this period, these two changes were of a kind a person could stand in a field and watch. One came on iron rails. One came up behind earthen walls, and then walls of stone, at more than one place in town.
Take the railroad first.
The Boston and Worcester Railroad was chartered in 1831 and built west from the city in stages, a few more miles of track opening every few months as the work crews advanced. On the twentieth of September, 1834, the directors and their guests rode the newly finished section out to a place called Factory Village, also known as Unionville, where a crowd had gathered and an artillery salute marked the train's arrival before the party turned around and rode back to Boston. Factory Village stood, at that date, inside the bounds of Hopkinton itself, more than a decade before any of it belonged to a separate town. A local farmer and militia captain named John Stone, who owned land along the route and had seen the railroad coming, had already built an inn beside the tracks in anticipation, the Railroad House, known today as Stone's Public House. Hopkinton's first railroad, in other words, arrived in 1834, within Hopkinton's own borders, complete with a cannon salute and a purpose-built hotel waiting for the passengers.
The town did not keep it long. In 1846 the same ground at Factory Village was set off, along with the rest of Unionville and portions of Framingham and Holliston, to form the new town of Ashland, carrying the 1834 railroad and Stone's inn away with it in the same stroke that redrew the boundary. A second station on the same trunk line, at Southville on Hopkinton's northern edge, was in service by about 1838, but it too sat at the town's margin rather than its center. For the better part of four decades after 1834, the village at the heart of Hopkinton, the town center itself, had no rail service of its own at all.
That changed slowly, and only after two attempts. The General Court granted a charter in 1854 for a Hopkinton Branch Railroad, but the company never laid a rail. A second charter, taken up in 1869, fared better, and this line, later merged with the Hopkinton and Milford Railroad Company to form the Hopkinton Railroad Company, finally built the branch connecting Ashland, Hopkinton, and Milford. Construction reached the town center by 1872, with a depot built near the site of what is now the Hopkinton Lumber Company on Main Street, and the branch opened for public use on the twenty-ninth of December, 1872, leased to and operated by the Providence and Worcester Railroad. Nearly forty years after the first train had passed through the far edge of the old, larger Hopkinton, the town's own center finally had a station of its own.
The line did not last as long as the town's memory of it. Passenger traffic declined through the early twentieth century as the automobile took over the roads the railroad had once outrun, and the Hopkinton branch was abandoned sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, leaving the town once again without a station, though not without the changes the rail years had already set in motion.
Two maps, made in this same broad span of years, show the shape of that change even without naming a date. The official plan of the town that Matthew Metcalf drew in 1831 showed no railroad, since none yet ran anywhere near Hopkinton's center. The county atlas published by the Walker firm in 1889, by contrast, drew the branch line running directly through the village, among the streets and schools and churches, a settled and ordinary feature of the place by then. Between Metcalf's plan and the Walker atlas lay the town's slow, twice-attempted effort to bring the railroad to its own center after watching it pass through a corner of the old town in 1834 and then lose that very corner to a new neighbor.
The coming of the rail meant a break with the old order, however long it took to arrive. Metcalf's plan had recorded Hopkinton's place in the world as two measured distances, the miles to the shire town and the miles to Boston, distances that a team of horses had to cover at the pace of a walk, a journey of the better part of a day to the city and back over rough road, the whole rhythm of the town's commerce set by how far a horse could haul a load between dawn and dark. The railroad broke that old rhythm once it finally reached the center in 1872. The distance to Boston that had been a day's hard hauling became an hour or two of steam, and the leather and the shoes and the people of Hopkinton moved on a wholly new scale of speed and bulk. A town that the railroad reaches is no longer a town that ends at the edge of what a horse can pull. It is joined fast to the city and to the markets and to the whole web of iron that was binding the Commonwealth together in those very decades. The shoe trade, already traced to its leading position among the towns of the state, had climbed there in the decades before the branch line opened, on the strength of dirt roads and horse teams and, for a time, a station that belonged to Ashland rather than to Hopkinton itself. When the line at last reached the town's own center, it did not create the industrial town so much as lock in and accelerate what the shoe trade had already begun.
The second change came not on rails but on water, and the evidence here is more concrete, because for the water of Hopkinton there is a body of well-researched local history that names the men who worked it and the shares they held. That research, compiled by local historian Dave Cormier for the Lake Maspenock Preservation Association, draws on Middlesex South District Registry deed records and is the source for nearly everything that follows about the dam and its owners.
Hopkinton is high and well-watered country. It sits on a height of land, and out of its uplands the streams run away in several directions to feed the rivers below. Among those streams was the Mill River, which gathered itself in a natural pond straddling the Hopkinton-Milford line, a pond the Nipmuc had known and fished long before any Englishman came, and ran south toward the mill country of Hopedale and Milford beyond. Along that river, in the early nineteenth century, there grew up an industrial economy older than the shoe and powered entirely by falling water. Before steam, before the rail, the energy that turned the wheels of a New England town was the energy of its running streams, and the Mill River was Hopkinton's working stream. Along it stood woolen mills and grain mills and dye mills and cider mills and sawmills, a whole scattered industry living on the kinetic force of the water as it fell from one level to the next. The 1831 survey of the town shows one of them by name: a sawmill run by a man named Littlefield, standing on Old Town Road north of the Haynes, Wilson, and Desper farmsteads, on ground that has since gone under the lake's own water or the woods that grew back over the old road once it was abandoned.
Among the mills the record names were the woolen works of Pearly and Ebenezer Hunt, brothers or close partners in the trade, standing near the pond that would in time bear the flooded ground their enterprise depended on.
Water power, for all its force, has a weakness, and the men who lived by it knew the weakness intimately. Falling water is only as reliable as the supply behind it. A mill needs a steady head, a dependable level of water held ready above the wheel, and a stream left to its own seasons does not provide one. In the wet months it runs high and free, and in the dry months it falls away, and a factory that must stop for want of water in August is a factory that cannot keep its bargains or pay its hands. The natural pond that fed the Mill River, before it was touched, was a modest thing, a glacial kettle fed by springs, enough for a stream but not enough for a guaranteed and constant head of working water. The mills needed more than nature gave. And so the mill owners did what mill owners across New England did. They built.
In 1833, or by some accounts 1834, a company of shareholders came together and built a dam at the pond's southern end to raise and hold its water and so even out the supply running down to their wheels. The shares in that enterprise, forty-four in all, were held by a small company of local men and firms: Smith Arnold and Waldo Earle, trading as Smith Arnold and Company; Luke Aldrich; Joseph Roy; Seth and Eli Kelly; Clark Fiske; and Pearly and Ebenezer Hunt, the owners of the woolen factory near the reservoir. The shareholders acquired title to the land the new dam would flood, and their deeds were recorded in 1833 with the Middlesex South District Registry, the flooded farmland selling at five to ten dollars an acre. It was not built, in this its first making, for the drinking water of distant cities or for any public purpose at all. It was built by private mill owners, acting together as an incorporated company, to serve their own mills, to turn an unreliable natural pond into a dependable industrial reservoir that would hold the water back in the wet season and let it down in the dry, keeping the head steady and the wheels turning the year round. The natural pond, raised behind that dam, was the beginning of what is known today as Lake Maspenock.
The shares in the reservoir company changed hands many times over the following decades, passing by sale and inheritance from one mill family to the next, Clark Fisk to John Parkhurst in 1833 itself, Pearly Hunt's own shares to Justin Eames in 1839, and on through a chain of local owners across the middle of the century. By 1860 the pattern of consolidation had run its course. The Social Manufacturing Company, which had gathered up a controlling block of the shares, sold the whole of its interest that year to the Draper Corporation of Hopedale, and from 1860 onward the reservoir that fed the Mill River belonged, in the main, to Draper outright.
The dam did not age well. By the 1880s it had been found unsafe, and rather than risk a failure, its operators left the gate open for the better part of a decade, sacrificing the very head of water the dam existed to hold. Around 1900 the Draper Corporation, by then the largest maker of industrial looms in the country and the dominant employer of the whole Mill River valley, decided the risk and the lost capacity could no longer be tolerated. In 1901 the dam was rebuilt, this time not in earth alone but with masonry walls, and raised seven feet above its predecessor's height. That single dam, still standing today roughly six hundred feet downstream of the Hopkinton-Milford line, a fifteen-foot earthfill structure faced in masonry, with a granite block spillway some thirty feet across, is substantially the same structure that now holds back Lake Maspenock. The raising of 1901 deepened and widened the reservoir into very nearly the body of water the town knows now, done for the plainest of industrial reasons, to keep the mills, and above all Draper's mills, safely supplied.
The reservoir's industrial purpose did not last forever either. Draper's Hopedale works finally closed in 1980, leaving a large empty building complex at the heart of that town and a reservoir no longer needed by the industry that had shaped and reshaped it for a century and a half. The Milford Water Company took on responsibility for the dam afterward, holding it until 2006, by which time earlier attempts by Milford and Hopedale to claim the lake outright for drinking water had already failed. The use of the water changed with it. Lake Maspenock's chief use today is recreational, a public beach, a boat launch, a body of water enjoyed for its own sake rather than for the wheels it once turned. The pond the Nipmuc fished, that mill owners dammed for their looms and their carding machines, that a great corporation rebuilt in stone to keep its own factories running, now serves the town mainly as a place to swim.
Lake Maspenock was not the only body of water in Hopkinton doing this work. On the opposite side of town, along Whitehall Brook, a second reservoir gathered its own mill village around it, and the record of that village runs even further back than the Mill River's. A grist mill stood on Whitehall Brook as early as 1714, a year before Hopkinton itself was incorporated, when the ground around it was still farmland scattered thinly north of a much smaller natural pond and its cedar swamp. A settler named John Wood ran a sawmill and an inn there in the town's early generations, and his son Joseph built a mill of his own. The family name stuck to the place, and the settlement that grew up around their mills became known as Woodville. Wood partnered with a man named Elnathan Allen, of Sudbury, in buying up three hundred acres near the swamp from his own father-in-law, later adding another two hundred acres and a sawmill to the holding, and the two men, not always scrupulous about whose timber they cut, laid the groundwork for what would become one of the town's busiest industrial villages.
In 1811 the Hopkinton Cotton Manufacturing Company began operating near the lower dam on the pond, a plant local histories credit as the second cotton-weaving mill built anywhere in the country. Dexter and Elbridge Rice, of the family that gave its name to Rice Street, built the brick houses that still stand along Wood Street for their workers. Woodville grew through the nineteenth century into an early center of cotton clothmaking and, in time, the site of a major shoe factory of its own, a second front in the same industry that Michael Raftery and the shoe peg were building elsewhere in town. Joseph Walker, the Hopkinton man credited with inventing the wooden shoe peg in 1818, made his home in Woodville, and a street there carries his name today.
Manufacturing was not the only business the water supported. In 1815 a violent storm remembered locally as the Great Blow tore through the same neighborhood and wrecked a sawmill belonging to Joel Norcross. Rebuilding the following year, Norcross uncovered three mineral springs within a short distance of one another, and rather than simply repair his mill he built a resort around the discovery. The waters were marketed as impregnated with minerals of great medicinal value, and for nearly four decades the claim held up well enough in the public imagination to draw a genuinely national clientele. Contemporary sources confirm the resort was no local curiosity: an 1845 geography of Massachusetts noted plainly that the mineral spring near White Hall Pond had some celebrity as a place of fashionable resort in the warm season, and an 1854 gazetteer recorded the same. Guests arrived first by horse-drawn coach and later by rail, once the Boston and Worcester line reached Westborough in 1834, and a hotel register once kept at the Hopkinton Public Library recorded visitors from every New England state as well as New York, Virginia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Texas. The whole neighborhood took the name Hopkinton Springs, one of six named districts that appeared on Hopkinton maps by the middle of the century. Whoever camped in that country before Norcross very likely knew the springs already; a scatter of stone mounds and two beehive-shaped stone structures, of unknown age and purpose, still stand nearby. What became of the resort is less celebrated than what it once was. The buildings were eventually razed or lost, and almost nothing above ground marks the spot today. Little remains, Hopkinton Historical Society curator Russ Greve told a reporter in 2009, of what feels now like a haunted site.
Woodville's industrial life ended the way Ashland's water-power had, at the hands of a thirsty city rather than a market downturn. In 1894 Boston seized Lake Whitehall for its own water supply, and the factories that had stood along its shores for the better part of a century were closed or moved away as sources of pollution the city would no longer tolerate. What the taking did not finish, fire did. The buildings that remained were destroyed in a fire in 1909, following earlier fires in 1876 and 1900 that had already crippled the village's manufacturing base. Woodville quietened into the neighborhood it is today, its nearly hundred surviving period homes, Greek Revival and Italianate and Federal, declared a historic district in 2005, its mill ponds and dams remembered now mostly in street names and in the reservoir itself.
Two kinds of change came to Hopkinton in these decades, unlike in their manner and alike in their meaning. One came on iron, first brushing the edge of the old, larger town in 1834 only to be carried off in the 1846 division that created Ashland, then finally reaching Hopkinton's own center in 1872, the line that joined the rising shoe town fast to the markets it needed. The other came up behind walls of earth and stone at both ends of town, the dammed and raised waters of the Mill River and of Whitehall Brook alike, built by companies of named mill men to steady the falling water that turned wheel after wheel across a century of manufacturing, the Mill River's reservoir bought up whole by the Draper Corporation and rebuilt in stone to keep Hopedale's looms running, Whitehall's taken by the city of Boston and its mills burned or abandoned, both set free in their different ways to become, in the end, nothing more than lakes.
The Hopkinton that Metcalf had drawn in 1831, a self-contained farming town of roads and dooryard mills measured out in horse-miles from Boston, was by the end of these decades a town threaded into the iron network of the Commonwealth and into the water-driven industry of the valleys on both its edges, its ponds no longer simply the ponds the Nipmuc had fished but working reservoirs, one owned in the end by one of the largest manufacturing companies in the country, the other by the city of Boston itself.