Boxborough, Massachusetts
A Short History of Boxborough
A farming town that had to ask three times to exist, that mustered at a neighbor’s house on the morning of the Revolution, and that in our own time voted to tax itself to keep a farm out of a developer’s hands.
A Town That Had to Ask Three Times
Boxborough did not start as its own town. Its land was farmed by families who lived on the far edges of Harvard, Littleton, and Stow, too far from any of those meeting houses to get there easily on a Sunday or a Town Meeting day. Petitioning to become a separate district of their own, they were turned down three times before the General Court finally agreed in 1782. Boxborough was incorporated on February 25, 1783. From the first, then, this was a town that existed because its residents kept showing up and asking, which is still how it runs.
The Morning of April 19, 1775
When the alarm came that British regulars were marching on Concord, 21 men from Boxborough gathered at the Boaz Brown house on Hill Road before setting out toward Lexington and Concord. One of them, a young fifer named Luther Blanchard, was among the militia at the North Bridge and was wounded there. The house at the center of that muster still stands, and the town keeps the route its men took marked as the Path of the Patriots.
A Farming Town, Slowly Growing
For most of its history Boxborough stayed small and agricultural. The first federal census, in 1790, counted just 412 people. The Silas Wetherbee House on Hill Road, built around 1770 and long known as Walnut Farm, survives from those early years. The town grew slowly for two centuries and then faster as the suburbs of Boston reached west along Route 111 and the interstate: by the 2020 census Boxborough was home to 5,506 residents. It still protects large stretches of open land, including the Beaver Valley Preserve, which holds a glacial esker more than a mile long.
Buying the Steele Farm
The clearest modern example of how Boxborough governs itself came in 1994. When the Steele Farm on Middle Road, roughly 36 acres and three buildings, was at risk of being lost, the town’s voters agreed at Town Meeting and then again at an override election to raise their own property taxes to buy it. No mayor and no city council made that decision. A room full of residents did, and the farm is protected town land today. It is a good thing to remember on the way to your first Town Meeting: the biggest choices here are still made by the people who show up.
Sources: town of Boxborough records; the Boxborough Historical Society; Wikipedia, “Boxborough, Massachusetts”; U.S. Census Bureau.