A Short History of Bedford

The Oldest Complete Flag in the Country

The Bedford Flag is the oldest complete flag known to exist in the United States, and it lives in this town. It is a square of crimson silk damask about 27 inches by 29 inches, woven through with pomegranates, grapes and leaves, and painted on both sides with a mailed arm reaching out of clouds to grasp a sword, three cannonballs in the air, and the Latin motto VINCE AUT MORIRE, Conquer or Die. The square shape marks it as a cavalry flag, made for a troop of the local Massachusetts Bay militia early in the eighteenth century.

Which means it was already an antique on the morning that made it famous. On April 19, 1775, Nathaniel Page, a Bedford minuteman, carried it toward the Concord Bridge. His family had been carrying it a long time by then: a commission of 1737, displayed beside the flag today, names his father John as Cornett of the Troop of horse, the cavalry officer whose whole duty was to bear the colours, and the Bedford and Billerica town records call a Page Cornet as early as 1720. The flag was conserved at the Textile Conservation Center in Lowell in 1999 and 2000, and that work turned up, under a microscope, one surviving strand of the silver fringe that once edged it.

You can go and look at it. It is in a climate controlled room on the Flag Balcony of the Bedford Free Public Library, viewable any time the library is open. Ask at the circulation desk or the reference desk, leave your driver’s licence or another secure deposit, and you are handed a magnetic key that unlocks the door. Five people at a time, and no flash photography, because light is destructive to aged red silk.

Two Federal Neighbours

Two large federal installations sit inside or against Bedford’s town line, and neither one is governed by the town. Hanscom Field, the airport operated by the Massachusetts Port Authority, is partly in Bedford, and Hanscom Air Force Base is close enough to Bedford’s civic life that the School Committee seats a representative from the base at its own table. The Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs campus at 200 Springs Road, admitted its first patient on July 17, 1928 and is named for the congresswoman who pushed to open its services to women in 1947. Bedford’s Select Board hears about both regularly, and one of its members sits on the Hanscom Field Advisory Commission, but the town does not run either of them. That is a useful thing to know about your own map: some of the ground inside a town line answers somewhere else entirely.

1974, and the Charter That Still Runs the Town

Here is the piece of Bedford history that most directly affects you. The town’s charter took effect on July 1, 1974, and it did something specific: it named the form of government Select Board and Open Town Meeting, it created the office of Town Manager as the town’s chief administrative officer hired by the Select Board, and it moved a long list of jobs out of the voters’ hands and into his. The Town Clerk is the clearest example. In Bedford she is a department head appointed by the Town Manager, not a name on your ballot.

The trade was deliberate: fewer offices on the ballot, and one professional administrator accountable to a board you do elect. Whether that was the right trade is a real question, and it is a question Bedford keeps reopening, because a charter can be amended the same way it was adopted. In November 2025 a Special Town Meeting voted a set of charter amendments, including striking the Petitioners’ Advisory Committee out of Article 2 entirely. On March 14, 2026 the voters gave those amendments the second approval the process requires, 782 to 410. The charter’s own cover page now records both steps.

The History the Town Keeps Itself

The Bedford Historical Society, an independent non-profit founded in 1893, collects, protects and restores the objects and records of the town’s past, and runs the Job Lane Farm Museum at 16 South Road. The town keeps its own Bedford collection at the public library, and it seats a Town Historian and a Historic Preservation Commission by appointment of the Select Board under charter section 3-3. Preservation here is not automatic and it is not private: a project usually has to go to the Community Preservation Committee for money, and Town Meeting votes those applications one at a time, in the room where every registered voter can stand up.