Ayer, Massachusetts
A Short History of Ayer
A railroad junction that grew big enough to leave Groton, a town named for the medicine magnate who paid for its town hall, and a place shaped for a century by the Army post next door.
1871, and the Junction That Left Groton
Ayer did not begin as a town. It began as the southern corner of Groton, where a mill was built near Nonacoicus Brook as early as 1667, and it stayed a corner of Groton for two hundred years. Then the railroads arrived. Line after line met at this one spot in the 1840s, and the settlement around the crossing grew fast enough to earn a name of its own, first South Groton and then Groton Junction. On February 14, 1871, it was incorporated as its own town. It took its name from Dr. James Cook Ayer, a wealthy Lowell manufacturer of patent medicines who helped pay for the new town hall. That is the pattern for much of Massachusetts: a town is usually a piece of an older town that got big enough to want its own vote.
The Town the Railroads Built
Ayer exists because of where the tracks crossed. Several lines converged here, beginning with the Fitchburg Railroad in 1844, and for decades the town was a busy junction where freight and passengers changed trains. The commuter rail still runs through Ayer today on the MBTA Fitchburg Line, which is one reason a town of this size sits where it does. When you look at a map of Ayer, you are really looking at a map of a nineteenth century rail hub that decided to become a town.
Fort Devens Next Door
For most of the twentieth century, the largest presence in Ayer’s life sat just over its line. In 1917, as the country entered the First World War, the Army established Camp Devens beside the town. It became the permanent Fort Devens and operated as an active Army post until 1996. A military base of that size shaped everything around it, the jobs, the housing, the businesses on Main Street, and its closing reshaped the region again. The land it left behind is still being put back to civilian use today.
Ayer Rewrites Its Own Government
Here is the piece of Ayer history that most directly affects you. For a long time Ayer, like most small Massachusetts towns, was run by a Select Board with the help of a Town Administrator. In October 2017, a Special Town Meeting voted to ask the Legislature to change that: to convert the Administrator into a Town Manager and to hand the office real authority over hiring, doing away with the town’s separate Personnel Board. The Legislature granted the request as Chapter 79 of the Acts of 2018. The trade was deliberate: one professional manager, accountable to a board you do elect, in charge of the town’s departments and personnel. Whether that was the right trade is a real question, and it is the kind of question Town Meeting can reopen, because a town can amend the way it governs itself the same way it adopted it.
Sources: Wikipedia, Ayer, Massachusetts and Fort Devens; Massachusetts Municipal Association, Ayer town manager coverage; Massachusetts Acts of 2018, Chapter 79 (malegislature.gov). U.S. Census Bureau.