Charlton, Massachusetts
A Short History of Charlton
A tavern at a crossroads, a green given away in 1762, a town that had to ask permission to exist, and a dentist from here who changed what surgery feels like.
A Petition, Because Church Was Too Far
Charlton began as the far edge of somebody else’s town. Around 1680 a group of men from north of Boston were granted a large section of land in the area of Oxford, and five of the grantees kept the western part to sell on. The families who settled that western part had a problem that sounds small and was not: the Oxford church was a long way off. Distance from a meeting house, in colonial Massachusetts, was distance from the only body that governed you. So they petitioned to separate.
It worked. On January 10, 1755, Charlton was established as a district separated from Oxford, and in 1775 a law that turned every district into a town made it a town. The name comes from Sir Francis Charlton. That first act, a petition from the people furthest from the room where decisions were made, is a fair description of what the rest of this page is about.
The Crossroads and the Green
Twenty years before the separation, in 1734, Ebenezer McIntire bought the hundred acre lot that is now Charlton Center. He opened a tavern on it, at the point where the lane from Brookfield to Oxford crossed the road that came over Dresser Hill from Leicester to Dudley. A tavern at a crossroads was the first piece of public infrastructure most New England villages got, because it was where travelers, mail, argument and news all stopped at once.
In 1762 the town green was donated for use as a common, a militia training field and a meeting house site: three functions, one elliptical piece of grass. It is still there, and the elected boards that meet a few hundred feet from it are still doing the third of those three jobs.
The Man from 27 Main Street
General Spurr took part in the Boston Tea Party. He later moved to Charlton to manage three thousand acres of his father in law’s land, and his house still stands at 27 Main Street. The same century brought the Salem Town mansion house to the Center, and a run of period homes around the green that a National Register survey would eventually count one by one.
The Roads That Went Around
Two pieces of transportation infrastructure shaped Charlton Center by ignoring it. The 1806 turnpike bypassed the village, and so did the railroad in 1837. Building slowed for the rest of the century, which is why the streetscape survived so intact. Then the trolley arrived, attention came back, and the town put up its Grange building in 1891 and its Town Hall in 1905.
That preservation by accident had a formal ending. In 1996 the Massachusetts Historical Commission and the National Park Service accepted the Charlton Center district for the National Register of Historic Places, listing 44 contributing buildings, five contributing sites and five objects. Getting there took a survey of every structure in the area, a written history, and a visit from state officers to walk the boundaries.
108 Women and a Library
Charlton’s public library has two ancestors and both were volunteer projects. In 1816, 108 women founded a private subscription library called the Female Social Library. In 1860 the Charlton Young Men’s Library Association started up separately. In 1882 the two merged into a public library, and in 1905 a Charlton native named William Henry Dexter gave the town Memorial Hall to put it in. He said he had thought only of erecting a library building and then widened the plan to hold the town offices too, which is why the library and the town government shared one address until 1998. The renovated and expanded library, about 27,000 square feet, opened in July 2007 at a cost of $7.2 million, and Dexter’s name is on the 2,500 square foot meeting hall on the third floor.
The Cane, and the Dentist
In August 1909 the publisher of the Boston Post mailed a gold headed ebony cane to the selectmen of 700 New England towns, Charlton among them, to be handed to the town’s oldest citizen and passed along at that citizen’s death. The cane belonged to the town, not to the person holding it. Charlton’s original went missing somewhere along the way, and the town’s Boston Post Cane Committee, activated by the selectmen on April 8, 2008, still asks residents to check their attics.
And one Charlton export changed something everybody eventually needs. William Thomas Green Morton was born here on August 9, 1819. In 1846 he gave the first public demonstration of inhaled ether as a surgical anaesthetic, which is the reason an operation today is something you sleep through.
Sources: Charlton Historical Commission, Charlton Center National Register Historic District (town-hosted); Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth, Cities and Towns of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; Charlton Public Library, History and Mission; the Town of Charlton’s own Boston Post Cane pages.