Boxford, Massachusetts
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. One of the early settlers was Abraham Redington. 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, with roughly forty families in residence. The town took its name from Boxford in Suffolk, England. That link was more legend than record for centuries, until residents traveled to England during the 1975 Bicentennial and confirmed the connection, followed the next summer by a reciprocal visit from the English village.
Meetinghouses and a Match Factory
The original First Church was built in 1701 in East Boxford Village, and a second meetinghouse went up in West Boxford 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: a match factory on Lawrence Road operated from 1866 to 1905 and was the town’s largest industry while it lasted.
Witch Hollow and the Salem Trials
Boxford’s history reaches into one of the darkest chapters in Massachusetts. Witch Hollow Farm, the Tyler-Wood House built about 1727, is connected to Rebecca Eames, a Boxford-area woman who was tried during the 1693 Salem witch trials. The house still stands, and the story is a plain part of how the town tells its own past.
Protecting the Land
Boxford stayed rural while towns around it filled in, and in the twentieth century residents began deliberately protecting that character. In 1978 a group of neighbors founded the Boxford Trails Association, later the Boxford Trails Association and Open Land Trust, which has helped permanently protect more than 1,200 acres and maintains over 100 miles of trails. Then in 2001 the town went further and voted at Town Meeting to adopt a 3 percent Community Preservation surcharge on its own 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: Wikipedia, Boxford, Massachusetts, with cited sources; Boxford Trails Association and Open Land Trust (btabolt.org); Town of Boxford; U.S. Census Bureau.