Ashby, Massachusetts
A Short History of Ashby
A hill town carved out of four older towns, kept mostly to farms and orchards, and the home ground of the man who taught America how to count itself.
Settled on the Frontier
English families first settled the land that is now Ashby around 1676, on high, wooded ground near the New Hampshire line that was then the edge of colonial Massachusetts. For most of a century it had no town of its own. Its farms belonged to the towns around it, and its people traveled miles to vote and worship. One early resident, John Fitch, was captured in 1748 and held for six months before returning home; a monument at the corner of South and Richardson roads still marks the story.
1767, Carved From Four Towns
Ashby was incorporated as a town in 1767, assembled from pieces of four of its neighbors: Townsend, Lunenburg, Fitchburg, and a district called Dorchester-Canada that later became part of Ashburnham. That origin is worth sitting with. A town in Massachusetts is not a natural thing on the land; it is a decision, drawn by the legislature out of parts of other towns because the families on that ground wanted a meeting and a government of their own. Ashby has governed itself by open Town Meeting ever since.
A Town of Farms and Orchards
Where other towns turned to mills and factories, Ashby stayed largely agricultural through the 1700s and 1800s. A few small mills worked its streams, but most of the land was farmed, and the town became known for its apple orchards. Walk the woods today and you can still find the straight old rows of orchard trees where fields have gone back to forest, a quiet record of what the town did for a living for two hundred years.
Lemuel Shattuck, and the Count That Changed Public Health
One person connected to Ashby left it and went on to change how the country counts itself. Lemuel Shattuck (1793 to 1859) became a pioneer of American vital statistics, the careful counting of births, deaths, and disease. His 1850 report on public health in Massachusetts laid out a blueprint for boards of health, sanitary surveys, and the collection of the numbers that modern public health still runs on. The next time you see a state figure on a page like this one, it descends in part from the work of a man this hill town helped raise.
Mount Watatic
Mount Watatic rises 1,832 feet along the town’s border with Ashburnham, one of the last open summits in this part of the state. A ski area ran on its slopes from the 1930s until 1984. In 2000 a company that owned the summit proposed a 150 foot communications tower, and the town, the Ashby Land Trust, the neighboring town of Ashburnham, and two state agencies answered by raising about 2.5 million dollars to buy the mountain. The roughly 281 acres they protected in 2002, summit included, are open to anyone willing to climb.
Willard Brook and the Land That Stayed Open
A large piece of Ashby lies inside Willard Brook State Forest, with Damon Pond, the cascade at Trap Falls, and miles of trail. Between the state forest and the town’s own conservation work, a rural town of a few thousand people has kept a remarkable share of its land open. That is not an accident of geography. It is the result of decisions made, again and again, in the same Town Meeting hall where the budget is voted.
Sources: Wikipedia, Ashby, Massachusetts; the Ashby Historical Society; the Ashby Land Trust; U.S. Census Bureau.