A Short History of Boxford

From a corner of Rowley Village settled in 1646, to a town of its own since 1685, to the wooded, trail-laced community that still votes its own budget in the open meeting hall.

Rowley Village, 1646

Europeans first settled the land that became Boxford in 1646, when it was still part of Rowley Village, an inland tract north of the coast. Farming shaped the place from the start, and the two clusters of homesteads that grew up around the meetinghouses became the villages of East Boxford and West Boxford, names that are still on the map today.

A Town of Its Own, 1685

Boxford was incorporated as a separate town in 1685, after 48 families living in Rowley Village, around 240 people, petitioned the General Court to be set off from Rowley.

Meetinghouses and a Match Factory

The First, or East, Parish built its meetinghouse in 1701, and West Boxford raised its own in 1734 and rebuilt it in 1774, a reminder that a New England town’s public life once centered on where people worshipped and met. Farming dominated the economy, but Boxford had industry too: in 1867 a match factory replaced the cotton spinning mill on Fish Brook, south of Lawrence Road.

Protecting the Land

Boxford stayed rural while towns around it filled in, and in the twentieth century residents began deliberately protecting that character. The Boxford Trails Association was founded in 1978 and renamed in 1998 as BTA/BOLT, the Boxford Trails Association and Boxford Open Land Trust; today it protects more than 1,500 acres and maintains the town’s extensive trail system. Then in May 2001 the voters of Boxford went further and adopted the Community Preservation Act with a 3 percent surcharge on most of their property taxes, funding still more conservation, historic preservation, and open space. The Conservation Commission now stewards hundreds of acres open to anyone who wants to walk them.

Boxford Today

The town covers about 23.6 square miles and is home to roughly 8,200 people. It still runs its own elementary schools and sends its older students to the regional Masconomet campus in town. And it still governs itself in one of the oldest forms of self-government in the country, an open Town Meeting where every registered voter is a member. The land the town has spent decades protecting, and the meeting hall where it decides what to protect next, are two halves of the same civic habit.

Sources: Massachusetts Historical Commission, Reconnaissance Survey Town Report, Boxford (1985); BTA/BOLT, the Boxford Trails Association and Boxford Open Land Trust (btabolt.org); Town of Boxford (the Community Preservation Committee); U.S. Census Bureau.

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MassCivics last checked this page on September 24, 2026.

Sources

Population and demographics: US Census Bureau, 2020 Census, P1, Boxford town, as of April 1, 2020.
History and incorporation: Secretary of the Commonwealth, MHC Reconnaissance Survey Town Report, Boxford (1985), as of January 1985.