Dudley, Massachusetts
A Short History of Dudley
From a Nipmuc village on Dudley Hill, to the first town incorporated in the new Worcester County, to a college and a stagecoach tavern that are both still standing.
Dudley Hill Before the Town
Start at the highest ground in town, because that is where the story starts. Dudley Hill was the site of a Native village long before any English settler arrived, though the center of Native settlement here was Lake Chaubunagungamaug, now in Webster, an intertribal meeting place where the Reverend John Eliot gathered a Christian Indian village in the middle of the seventeenth century. Walk that hill now and you are walking layer on layer of Dudley: the Native village, then the colonial town center, then Nichols Academy, then Nichols College, one after another on the same rise.
1681 and 1732
Three dates make the town. In 1681 the Nipmuc sold a large tract of south central Massachusetts to colonial investors, keeping five square miles between Dudley Hill and Lake Chaubunagungamaug for themselves. About forty years later that reservation was sold as well. And in 1732 Dudley became the first town incorporated in the new Worcester County, which is the year the Board of Selectmen dates itself from and the year the open Town Meeting became Dudley’s legislature.
The River With a French Name
The French River runs the line between Dudley and Webster, and it is called that because of a Huguenot settlement led by Gabriel Bernon, French Protestants who came to this valley to get out of the way of a king. The river later turned mills, and the mills brought the workers whose descendants fill the voter rolls today. A river, a refugee community, a mill, a town: that sequence built most of southern Worcester County.
April 1776, Along Route 31
In April 1776, on his way from Boston to New York after the Siege of Boston, George Washington camped in Dudley with the Continental Army, along what is now a stretch of Route 31 near the Connecticut border. The Library of Congress holds the transcript that puts him here. The army that had just pushed the British out of Boston harbor came through this town, and the road it used is a road Dudley students still ride on.
The Black Tavern, About 1803
Around 1803 Hezekiah Healy began building what became the Black Tavern, a stop on the stagecoach route between Boston and Hartford. It is one of the finest Federal period buildings in town, it joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1985, and it is still standing on Center Road, still open, because a volunteer historical society keeps it that way. Before the highways, this is what a highway service plaza looked like.
1816: Nichols Academy
In 1816 Amasa Nichols established Nichols Academy in the town center, a Universalist institution on Dudley Hill. The industrialist Samuel Slater, whose mills were transforming this whole river valley, was an early benefactor. The academy grew into Nichols College, which is still on the hill, which means a Dudley teenager can walk to a four-year college campus that has been part of the town for more than two centuries.
1897, and a Library Built on the Old Town Hall
Dudley’s public library opened in 1897. It moved more than once, and in the early twenty-first century a new building went up over the site of the former town hall, which had itself been relocated. That is a very Dudley kind of history: the town does not knock things down so much as move them and reuse the ground. The war memorial put up in 1909 in front of the Conant Memorial Congregational Church, on the town common, is still where it was set.
Sources: Town of Dudley, “History” and Board of Selectmen pages, dudleyma.gov; Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (1905); the Huguenot Memorial Society of Oxford; the George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, Series 3a Varick Transcript; the Historical Marker Database; The Black Tavern Historical Society; U.S. Census Bureau.
MassCivics last checked this page on October 16, 2026.
Sources
- Town records: Town of Dudley, History, as of October 2026.