Acton, Massachusetts
A Short History of Acton
A footpath that is on the National Register of Historic Places, five mill villages that still have their own names, and a town that went from orchards to subdivisions inside one generation.
A Trail You Can Still Walk
Every April, before sunrise, people gather at a house on Hayward Road in Acton and walk to Concord. They start with a ceremony at about ten minutes to six in the morning, reach the monument at Acton Center around twenty past, and arrive at the Old North Bridge near nine. They are following a route marked with stones that read “Line of March, April 19, 1775”, and the route itself is a listed historic property: the Isaac Davis Trail went onto the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. Not a building, not a monument. A way of getting from here to there, preserved because of who walked it and what happened at the other end.
1735, and the Land Before It
Acton was part of Concord until 1735. The Secretary of the Commonwealth’s own record of incorporations gives the two dates that matter: settled in 1680, incorporated as a town in 1735, in Middlesex County. Before any of that, the highlands at the headwaters of the Assabet River and Nashoba Brook were used by Nipmuck-related Native people for hunting, fishing, gathering and some limited farming, and artifacts from those early villages have been found in Acton, particularly around Nagog Pond. The first European settler was John Law, Concord’s shepherd, who built a house in 1656 on School Street near Lawsbrook Road, and nearly all of the town’s roughly 12,990 acres came out of four colonial land grants.
The town’s common came next, and slightly out of order: the first meetinghouse went up in 1736, and the two acres it stood on were given to the town by Anne Cuming in 1737, after the building was already there.
April 19, 1775
Sometime between two and three in the morning on April 19, 1775, the alarm reached Acton. Members of Captain Isaac Davis’s company assembled at his house and prepared to march. At Concord’s North Bridge the militia formed up by seniority of companies, with the minute men at the head, and the Acton company under Davis was placed at the front of the column that advanced on the bridge. Davis was killed there, the first officer to fall in the Revolution, along with Abner Hosmer of his company; James Hayward of Acton was mortally wounded later the same day during the British retreat.
In 1851 the Commonwealth and the town together raised a monument on the common: a seventy five foot granite obelisk on an arched pedestal, designed by Charles E. Parker of Boston. The three men were reinterred in a vault in its base, and their original slate gravestones are set into the mound around it, alongside a stepping stone taken from the causeway of the North Bridge itself.
Mills, Then a Railroad, Then Five Villages
Acton was a mill town before it was anything else, and the water came first. Mills ran on Fort Pond Brook in South Acton as early as 1701, a forge stood on Nashoba Brook below Ice House Pond by 1728, and at least four mills worked that brook by 1738. What the town made changed by the century: barrels first, then young birch cut into hoop poles for Florida citrus crates, then woolen cloth at the Faulkner Mills, one of the first large scale woolen manufacturers in the country. Powder mills opened on the Acton line in 1835 and ran into the 1940s. A pencil factory operated on Nashoba Brook at Brook Street from 1848 until 1888. Quarrying went on all through the 1800s and became a major industry in the 1880s.
The railroad arrived in the 1840s, running through South and West Acton, and the town’s own master plan is blunt about what it did: only with the arrival of the railroad did the villages really begin to grow. It also decided which village would be which. The line made South and West Acton the commercial and industrial centers and bypassed Acton Centre, which stayed the civic one. That is why Acton still has five village names on one map, South Acton, West Acton, East Acton, North Acton and the Centre, rather than one downtown.
Apples to Houses, in One Generation
At the turn of the twentieth century Acton was still farming, with five villages and 2,120 people, and apples were the main export, shipped to Boston and to Europe. Before modern refrigeration the town auctioned off space in the cellar of the town hall for storage, and apples were still being stored in the center of West Acton into the 1950s.
Then it changed very fast. There were 3,500 people in Acton in 1950. By 1974 there were about 17,000. The orchards and open fields in the southern half of town became subdivisions, and the town built the institutions a suburb needs, having already formed a water district in 1912 for West and South Acton and started a town fire department in West Acton in 1915. Today about 24,000 people live here. If you want to know why Acton looks the way it does, that generation is the answer.
2013: The Town Voted to Merge Its Schools
Here is the piece of Acton history most likely to have shaped your own day. Until 2014 Acton ran its own elementary district and shared only the junior high and the high school with Boxborough. On a June night in 2013, at separate special town meetings, the two towns voted to combine everything into a single regional district from PreK through grade 12. Acton’s meeting passed it 349 to 194. Boxborough’s passed it 439 to 195. Boxborough’s enrollment had been falling, from 477 students toward a projected 378, and running a school system of its own was getting harder each year.
The new district became operational on July 1, 2014. That is why your School Committee has eleven members and why four of them are elected by voters in another town. If you attend an Acton-Boxborough school, it has the shape it has because two rooms full of neighbors raised their hands.
Sources: Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth, City and Town Incorporation and Settlement Dates; Town of Acton Master Plan, Chapter 4, Historic and Cultural Resources; National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Acton Centre Historic District (reference 83000780) and listing for the Isaac Davis Trail (reference 72001347); National Park Service, Captain Isaac Davis and Minute Man National Historical Park; the Acton Minutemen; contemporary press coverage of the June 2013 regionalization votes. Exact dates that the sources disagree on are given by year rather than resolved silently.