Drawing The Lines
Frontiers and Loose Edges
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 30 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, leased, and disputed, with the Hopkins fund holding great blocks of it on paper. Meanwhile, settlers like Taft pushed 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’s modern boundaries were forged by loss rather than design. Over a century and a quarter, the town was whittled into its current shape after surrendering territory to form Upton in 1735 and Ashland in 1846.
The Remote Outlands Petition for Separation
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 a rich land, but it was open to settlement, and by the seventeen-thirties enough families had pushed into it to make its original configuration intolerable. Living in the remote overlaps of four distant towns: Mendon, Sutton, Uxbridge, and Hopkinton, the settlers faced long, miserable Sabbath journeys just to attend church. Unwilling to endure permanent isolation from their own worship, they did what many frontier families did and petitioned to be set off as their own town.
According to Hurd, the petition went to the Provincial Court on the thirty-first of January, 1735, and the name at the head of it was John Hazeltine. As the human thread running through Upton’s founding, John Hazeltine led the scattered upland families in leaving Hopkinton in 1735. He and his neighbors petitioned the General Court for a separate township, using dry legal phrasing that masked a simple, urgent need: hard-working frontier settlers who wanted a church they could actually reach.
Carving Out the New Township
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 incorporating act precisely details how Upton was assembled from the outlands of four towns, totaling over 13,000 acres. Surveyors carved out the new township by compass bearing and perch—tracing a boundary line from Grafton down through Sutton, Hopkinton, and local landmarks like North Pond—to systematically lift a piece of Hopkinton and set it into Upton.
One fine human touch survives buried in the surveyor's bearings, the kind of thing the old deeds preserve unintentionally. At one corner the line ran north along the Uxbridge bound ten hundred and twenty-two perches 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.
Organizing the Town and Inheriting the Land Disputes
After passing the act, the court authorized Hazeltine to convene Upton’s first town meeting on August 8, 1735. Gathering at John Sadler's house in the absence of a meetinghouse, the settlers elected their initial officers and named Hazeltine, their petition leader, as moderator to lead their first self-governing assembly. 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 slice of Hopkinton given to Upton was no random corner—it included roughly 3,000 acres of the trouble-plagued Hopkins fund. Along with the land, Upton inherited Hopkinton's lease and rent disputes with the trustees, entangling both towns in decades of conflict until the Legislature resolved it in the 1830s.
The Second Set-Off: Creating Ashland
More than a century would pass before the second calving of land from the original town occurred. 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 the town of Ashland, in 1846.
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.
Perambulating and Fixing the Final Lines
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.