Brookfield, Massachusetts
A Short History of Brookfield
From the Quaboag Plantation, one of the earliest inland settlements in Massachusetts, to the parent town of the four Brookfields, this is a place that has been settling its own business by town meeting for a very long time.
The Quaboag Plantation
The land along the Quaboag River was home to the Nipmuc people long before any English settler arrived, and the area carried the name Quaboag. English colonists from Ipswich first settled here in 1660, on a grant known as the Quaboag Plantation, which made it one of the earliest inland settlements in the Massachusetts Bay Colony at a time when most English towns still hugged the coast.
Abandoned and Rebuilt
The first plantation did not last. The settlement was abandoned during King Philip’s War in 1675, and years passed before families returned to rebuild along the river. When the town was formally organized again, it was incorporated in 1718 under the name Brookfield. The long gap between the first 1660 settlement and the 1718 incorporation is the reason the town counts its official age from the later date, even though people had lived and farmed here two generations earlier.
The Parent of the Brookfields
Old Brookfield was far larger than the town you live in today, because everything that is now North, West, and East Brookfield was once part of it. One by one those districts grew large enough to run their own affairs and voted to separate: North Brookfield became its own town in 1812, West Brookfield in 1848, and East Brookfield, the last, in 1920. Each new town began the same way, with a room full of residents voting to govern themselves, in the same form of open town meeting that still votes Brookfield’s budget.
A Town on the Quaboag
Brookfield sits along the Quaboag River in the southwestern corner of Worcester County, with Quaboag Pond and Quacumquasit Pond on its eastern edge toward East Brookfield and Sturbridge. The town center grew up where two main roads still cross, at Route 9 and Route 148, and the town covers about 16.6 square miles. Farming, mills along the river, and later small manufacturing shaped the town, and the water that powered those mills is the same system the town owns and runs for its residents today.
Sources: Wikipedia, Brookfield, Massachusetts, and Quaboag Plantation; U.S. Census Bureau.