Birth Of A Town
A town is born on paper before it is ever born in fact. On the thirteenth of December, 1715, the area of land that had been assembled became, in the eyes of the province, a town. It had a name by then, the name of a long-dead Connecticut royal 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 that the fledgling colonial government 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 grew organically before incorporating; Hopkinton was created in reverse. A single legal act established the town on land owned by a distant charitable fund, making its settlers tenants rather than proprietors. Hopkinton began not as a self-governing community, but as an estate designed to generate income for others—a dynamic that shadowed the town for a century.
Still, cheap rent drew families with few other prospects. A landless laborer could secure enough acreage to feed his family, yet the land remained leased, not owned. Every stone cleared, orchard planted, and house framed raised the value of property that belonged to the trustees. While this arrangement successfully peopled the town, it quietly planted the seeds of bitter, long-term disputes that would erupt as the 99-year leases neared their expiration.
Uniquely, Hopkinton's farm rents flowed sixty miles east to Cambridge to fund Harvard scholars and books. The hard labor of local farmers sustained a distant institution they would likely never see. Though founded on the generous vision of Edward Hopkins to promote learning, the town was structured at its core as a revenue source for outsiders—a burden it would carry in its bones for generations.
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 for it. If a rate was laid, it was laid for them and not by them.
Another essential element missing from these early days. In order to attain legitimacy as a town in the General Court’s view, Hopkinton needed an established church with a permanent minister. At one of the early town meetings first selectman John How was given an expense account to find a pastor. How traveled to Medway and recruited Harvard graduate Reverend Samuel Barrett, a young man of 25. Barrett served in the role until his death in 1772.
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.