Dunstable, Massachusetts
A Short History of Dunstable
From a colonial land grant of two hundred square miles that once reached into New Hampshire, to a rural town of under seventeen square miles that still votes its own budget in one room.
The Two-Hundred-Square-Mile Town
When Dunstable was granted in 1661, it was enormous. The original township covered about two hundred square miles, far larger than the town you live in now. Inside its bounds lay land that is now Pepperell, Townsend and Tyngsborough in Massachusetts, and Hudson, Nashua and Hollis across the line in New Hampshire. Over the next century, as more people settled and each corner grew large enough to run its own affairs, section after section broke off to become a town of its own. What is left is the small southern remnant that kept the old name.
Settled 1656, Incorporated 1673
Europeans first settled here in 1656, and Dunstable was officially incorporated in 1673, which makes it one of the older towns in Massachusetts. The town’s first settler was Edward Tyng, who likely came from Dunstable in Bedfordshire, England, and gave the new town its name. The neighboring town of Tyngsborough, once part of Dunstable, carries his family name to this day. This was frontier country in the seventeenth century, the northwestern edge of English settlement, and life here was shaped by that distance from the older coastal towns.
The Line That Moved a Town Into Another State
For decades the boundary between Massachusetts and New Hampshire was in dispute, and when the crown finally fixed it in 1740 the line ran straight through old Dunstable. The northern part of the town, including what is now the city of Nashua, ended up on the New Hampshire side. The southern part stayed in Massachusetts and remained the Dunstable of today. It is a rare thing: a town that went to bed in one colony and woke up split between two, not by a vote but by a surveyor’s line.
A Rural Town That Buys Back Its Own Land
Through all of that growth and shrinking, Dunstable held onto a largely rural character of farms, fields and woodland, and in this century it has worked to keep it. In 2006 residents voted at a Special Town Meeting to adopt the Community Preservation Act, adding a 3 percent surcharge to their own property tax bills. Months later the town spent the first of that money to buy Ferrari Farm, 135 acres of fields and woods it now owns outright, and the same fund has gone on protecting open space, historic records and recreation land ever since. The decision was made the way Dunstable has made its decisions for centuries: by the voters who came to the meeting.
Sources: Wikipedia, Dunstable, Massachusetts; Town of Dunstable Community Preservation records; U.S. Census Bureau.