Ashburnham, Massachusetts
A Short History of Ashburnham
From land granted to Colonial soldiers, to a hill town known for its carriage shops, to the fall night in 1907 when residents voted to buy their own electric company and never gave it back.
Dorchester-Canada
Before it had its name, the land that is now Ashburnham was called the Plantation of Dorchester-Canada. It had been granted to officers and soldiers who took part in a 1690 expedition to Canada, a common way the Colonial government paid for military service: with land on the frontier. English families began settling these Worcester County hills in 1736, and in 1765 the Province of Massachusetts Bay incorporated the settlement as the town of Ashburnham. The name is British, most likely for the Earl of Ashburnham.
A Town Meeting Town from the Start
Ashburnham was built the way most inland New England towns were: around a meetinghouse, with the town’s business decided by the voters themselves gathered in one room. That form never changed. The open Town Meeting that votes your school budget today is the direct descendant of the meetings that laid out the first roads and set the first tax rate. When you read later in this guide that any registered voter can walk in and vote, you are reading a rule almost as old as the town.
Schools and a Library
Two institutions gave nineteenth-century Ashburnham a reach beyond its size. Cushing Academy, an independent preparatory school, was founded in the town and still draws boarding and day students from around the world. And in 1891 the Stevens Memorial Library opened its doors, built and furnished with a ten thousand dollar gift from the estate of the benefactor it is named for. Both are still here, and the library is still the town’s, open to every resident.
The Town That Kept the Lights On
The story that best explains Ashburnham is about electricity. A private firm, the Greene Electric Company, built a small hydro plant that was lighting about sixty homes by 1902, but the pond behind it could not hold enough water to run year round, the company failed, and by 1904 the town was back to candlelight. Rather than wait for another company, the voters acted. At a series of Special Town Meetings in the fall of 1907 they agreed to buy what was left of Greene Electric for five thousand dollars and run the utility themselves, and the Ashburnham Municipal Light Plant was formally established at the last of those meetings on October 29, 1907. The Selectmen ran it at first, and in March 1908 voters elected the first three-member Light Board. More than a century later the town still owns its power, and the Light Board still appears on your ballot.
Hills and Water
Ashburnham’s geography shaped its history and still shapes its map. The town covers about 41 square miles of Worcester County hill country. Mount Watatic, near the New Hampshire line, was named one of the thousand great places in Massachusetts and is now protected conservation land laced with hiking trails. Spring-fed Upper Naukeag Lake serves as a public water source. Those hills and ponds are the reason a hydro company came here in the first place, and the reason the town still guards its open space.
Sources: Ashburnham Municipal Light Plant (amlp.org); Stevens Memorial Library (ashburnhamlibrary.org); the Wikipedia entry for Ashburnham, Massachusetts; U.S. Census Bureau.