Boylston, Massachusetts
A Short History of Boylston
From land conveyed by Nashaway sachems, to a farming parish that voted itself into a town in 1786, to a reservoir that reshaped a third of its map so that Boston could drink.
Before the Town
European settlement of this ground began around 1706, on land conveyed by the Nashaway sachems Sholan and George Tahanto. That second name still carries: the regional middle and high school that Boylston and Berlin students share is named Tahanto. For most of the eighteenth century the settlement here was not a town at all but the North Parish of Shrewsbury, a farming community far enough from Shrewsbury’s meetinghouse that its residents came to want their own.
1786, a Town of Its Own
In 1786 the North Parish got its wish. Boylston was incorporated that year from land that had belonged to Shrewsbury and Lancaster, and it has governed itself by town meeting ever since. The same instinct that split a parish off from a distant meetinghouse is the one that still fills the seats at the annual meeting: the people who live here decide the business here.
The Man on the Signpost
The town took its name from Ward Nicholas Boylston, a Boston merchant and benefactor who lived from 1747 to 1828. In 1797 he established a fund for the new town, and the money that grew out of it helped pay for the town hall and the school. Naming a town for a benefactor was a common bargain in that era, and Boylston kept its side of it on the signpost.
The Reservoir That Changed the Map
In the early twentieth century the Commonwealth built the Wachusett Reservoir, and Boylston gave up a large piece of itself to it. The reservoir now fills roughly 5,000 acres of the town’s northwestern corner, part of the water supply that reaches Greater Boston, and its construction ended the mills that the Nashua River had once powered. A town that had run on farming and small industry became, in part, a protected watershed, and that is still one of the first things a map of Boylston shows you.
Two Towns, One School
Boylston has long educated its children alongside neighboring Berlin. The two towns run a regional school district together, and its middle and high school carries the name Tahanto, from the same sachem whose deed opened this land to settlement. When Boylston voters approve a school budget at Town Meeting, they are voting on a system they share with the town next door, which is why the School Committee answers to both.
A Garden of National Note
The Worcester County Horticultural Society, founded in 1842, moved its home to Boylston and opened Tower Hill Botanic Garden in 1986. Today it is the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill, about 200 acres of display gardens on French Drive that draw visitors from across the region, and it is one of the reasons a small town north of Worcester turns up on lists it is easy to overlook.
Sources: Wikipedia, Boylston, Massachusetts (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boylston,_Massachusetts); Wikipedia, New England Botanic Garden; U.S. Census Bureau.