East Brookfield, Massachusetts
A Short History of East Brookfield
From a village of the old Quaboag Plantation, to a mill and railroad town on the shore of Lake Lashaway, to the youngest town in Massachusetts and the boyhood ground of the Grand Old Man of Baseball.
The Baby Town of the Commonwealth
On March 24, 1920, the Massachusetts Senate passed a bill splitting East Brookfield from Brookfield, and Governor Calvin Coolidge signed it into law the next day. That makes East Brookfield the newest town in Massachusetts by date of incorporation, which is why it still answers to the nickname the Baby Town of the Commonwealth. The land was old long before the town was: it had been the eastern village of the Quaboag Plantation, which became the town of Brookfield in 1673, and as early as 1738 the people of the village of Podunk in its southern end had petitioned to break away. That first petition was denied, and full separation took nearly two more centuries to arrive.
Rivers, Mills, and the Railroad
Before European settlement the Lashaway and Quaboag peoples used the Seven Mile and Quaboag rivers as routes of commerce, and those same waters later turned the mills that made East Brookfield an industrial village. When the Western Railroad reached the town in 1839, connecting it to Worcester and Springfield, the mills multiplied, turning out textiles, shoes, pottery, brick, iron and steel tools, bicycles, and carriage wheels. Street railways followed in 1896 and 1901, and a summer amusement park grew up on the shore of Lake Lashaway. The Great Depression closed many of the factories after 1929, and the town slowly became the residential community it is today.
The Grand Old Man of Baseball
East Brookfield’s most famous citizen is Cornelius McGillicuddy, known to the country as Connie Mack, the Grand Old Man of Baseball. Mack managed and owned the Philadelphia Athletics across a career that spanned nearly fifty years, longer than any manager before or since, and the town remembers him at its own front door: the Memorial Town Complex, where the Board of Selectmen and Town Meeting do the town’s business, stands on Connie Mack Drive.
Inventors and a Senator
For a small town, East Brookfield sent an outsized number of ideas into the world. James L. Plimpton reworked the design of the roller skate and helped launch roller skating as a sport, and his relative Henry Plimpton applied ball and roller bearings to carriage wheels and was among the first in the area to light his home with electricity, with help from his friend Thomas Edison. State Senator Warren Tarbell, an East Brookfield businessman, carried the town’s cause on Beacon Hill and was a driving force behind the separation and incorporation that finally made East Brookfield a town of its own in 1920.
Sources: Town of East Brookfield, History of East Brookfield (eastbrookfieldma.us); Wikipedia, East Brookfield, Massachusetts; U.S. Census Bureau.