Douglas, Massachusetts
A Short History of Douglas
From a settlement called New Sherborn, to a town that traded its own name for a school fund, to the axe works that made it known across the country and the state forest where three states meet.
New Sherborn
The first English families came here in the 1720s from Sherborn, in Middlesex County, and for a generation the place carried their old town’s name, spelled New Sherborn or New Sherburne. This is Nipmuc country in the far south of Worcester County, hard against the borders that would become Connecticut and Rhode Island, and the land is what shaped the early economy: forest for timber, and rivers with enough fall to turn a mill wheel.
The Bargain of 1746
Then came one of the more unusual deals in the history of Massachusetts towns. In 1746 Dr. William Douglass, a Boston physician, offered the settlement $500 and thirty acres of land, together with a dwelling house and a barn, to endow free schools, on a single condition: that the town take his name. The district agreed, and that year it took the name Douglas. It was made a town in 1775, by the general act under which districts became towns. Douglass was a well known and combative figure in colonial Boston, remembered for writing an early history of the British colonies and for opposing smallpox inoculation, but here he is remembered as the man whose gift a town accepted in exchange for spending on its children. Parts of his larger pledge were never fully paid, but the name stuck, and the reason it stuck was a school.
The Axe Works
In the early nineteenth century the Mumford River gave Douglas its industry. Grist mills and saw mills gave way to shops and small factories, and one of them made the town’s name known well beyond Worcester County: the Douglas Axe Manufacturing Company, run by the Hunt brothers, which turned out edged tools that were shipped across the growing country. Around the mills grew the village of East Douglas, and the pattern of a working New England town, church, shops, and a mill on the river, took hold.
Where Three States Meet
Douglas today is best known for its open land. Douglas State Forest, roughly 5,907 acres managed by the state, fills the town’s southwestern corner around Wallum Lake and includes a rare Atlantic white cedar swamp. It is one of the few places where you can stand at the point where Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island all meet. In the town center, the Old Douglas Center Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, preserves the older face of the town that grew up around its meetinghouse and common.
Sources: William A. Emerson, History of the Town of Douglas, Massachusetts (1879); Town of Douglas, About Douglas.
MassCivics last checked this page on October 15, 2026.
Sources
- Town records: Town of Douglas, About Douglas, as of October 2026.