Dartmouth, Massachusetts
A Short History of Dartmouth
From a refuge for people the colonies would not tolerate, to a whaling and shipbuilding harbor, to a town that gave away four of its own children and kept the farmland.
A Refuge Before It Was a Town
Dartmouth was incorporated in 1664, on land Plymouth Colony had purchased from the Wampanoag leader Massasoit, which makes it one of the oldest towns in Massachusetts. The people who came here first were not looking for opportunity so much as for distance. Members of the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers, were being punished for their beliefs in both the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, and in the 1650s and 1660s they settled here among Dartmouth’s earliest English arrivals. A town founded by people who needed the authorities to leave them alone has a particular relationship with government, and you can still hear it at town meeting.
King Philip’s War
In 1675 and 1676, the conflict known as King Philip’s War reached Dartmouth, and the town was largely burned. It was rebuilt afterward. That is the plain fact of it, and it belongs in any honest account of how this town came to be: the settlement you live in is the second one on this ground.
Padanaram and the Harbor
The South Dartmouth village of Padanaram grew up around John Russell’s land purchase in 1661 and became a shipbuilding and whaling port on Apponagansett Bay. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the town’s economy ran on those two trades, building vessels and sending them out, until New Bedford’s deeper harbor eclipsed Padanaram as the region’s whaling capital. Walk the waterfront today and the working boats are still there, doing different work.
The Town That Gave Away Four Towns
Old Dartmouth was enormous. What is now New Bedford, Fairhaven, Acushnet and Westport all sat inside its original bounds. They separated one by one, beginning with New Bedford in 1787. So the map of southeastern Massachusetts you know is the result of a series of local decisions about who should govern whom, made by people in rooms not unlike the one your Select Board meets in. Borders are a choice, and this county is the proof.
The University Arrives
In 1964 the campus that became the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth opened as Southeastern Massachusetts Technological Institute, and in 1991 it joined the University of Massachusetts system. A public university reshapes the town around it: what gets built, who moves in, which roads get widened, and what a local student can reach without leaving home.
Sources: Town of Dartmouth; University of Massachusetts Dartmouth; U.S. Census Bureau.