Berkley, Massachusetts
A Short History of Berkley
A town settled in the 1630s, carved out of its two larger neighbors, named for a philosopher-bishop by an accident of spelling, and keeper of a riddle carved in stone that people have argued over for centuries.
Settled 1638, a Town in 1735
The land that is now Berkley was first settled by English colonists around 1638, on ground between the Taunton River and Assonet Bay that had long been home to Native peoples. For nearly a century it was governed as parts of the neighboring towns of Dighton and Taunton. In 1735 the Massachusetts General Court set that land off as its own town. Berkley has governed itself by Town Meeting ever since, which means the form of government you can walk into today is very close to the one the town was born with.
Named for a Bishop
The town takes its name from George Berkeley, the Anglican bishop and philosopher who lived from 1685 to 1753 and spent a few years in Newport, Rhode Island, just across the water. The spelling changed along the way, from Berkeley to Berkley, and the likeliest explanation is a plain one: the clerk who engrossed the act for the General Court simply wrote it that way, and it stuck. It is a small reminder that the official record is written by people, and people leave their fingerprints on it.
Dighton Rock
On the Berkley shore of the Taunton River, inside Dighton Rock State Park, sits a genuine historical puzzle. Dighton Rock is a large boulder covered in petroglyphs, carved markings whose age and authorship people have debated for more than three centuries. Many different peoples have been credited with them over the years, and no single answer has ever settled the question. The rock is now housed in a museum inside the park, which makes Berkley the improbable home of a mystery that scholars have never closed.
A Town on the Water’s Edge
Geography has always shaped Berkley. The Taunton River and Dighton lie to the west, Taunton to the north and northeast, Lakeville to the east, and Assonet Bay and Freetown to the south. The Taunton River that forms the town’s western edge is a federally designated Wild and Scenic River, one of the few in the region, and for generations Berkley was a farming and river town rather than a mill city. That history is why a town of fewer than seven thousand people still settles its budget and its bylaws through a single open meeting, the way its founders did.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkley,_Massachusetts, with its own cited sources; U.S. Census Bureau; the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (Dighton Rock State Park).