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 Native 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.
Two Founding Dates
The Massachusetts Historical Commission records that the first meetinghouse was burned in 1675 and that a second was built on the same site in 1715 and 1716, after families resettled the grant. The official records give the town’s founding two dates. The Secretary of the Commonwealth lists Brookfield as incorporated as a town in 1718, the year the General Court invested it with the privileges of a town and enlarged the grant to an eight mile square township. The Town’s own annual report says Brookfield was incorporated as a town in 1673, the year the General Court first recorded the common land called Quobauge. Either way, people had lived and farmed here since the 1660 settlement.
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 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: Massachusetts Historical Commission, Reconnaissance Survey Town Report for Brookfield; Secretary of the Commonwealth, City and Town Incorporation and Settlement Dates, and Historical Data Relating to Counties, Cities and Towns in Massachusetts; Town of Brookfield, Annual Town Report; U.S. Census Bureau.
MassCivics last checked this page on September 25, 2026.
Sources
- Population and demographics: US Census Bureau, Census profile of Brookfield town, Worcester County (American Community Survey 5-year estimates 2020-2024 and the 2020 Census), as of April 1, 2020.
- History and incorporation: Secretary of the Commonwealth, MHC Reconnaissance Survey Town Report, Brookfield (1984), as of January 1984.