A Short History of Easton

Two Early Town Meeting Votes

The first thing the new town did was fight about its own town meeting. The town’s own history records an impassioned controversy over where to put the meeting house, and it split the early community. Keep that in mind the next time a warrant article seems small. The question of where residents gather to decide things was contentious enough, three hundred years ago, to divide the town that had just been created.

The second vote is the one worth arguing about in class. At a town meeting in the 1740s, Easton voters worked out that the state fine for not having schools cost less than the schools would, and voted to pay the fine. That is a real decision made in the same kind of room, by the same kind of vote, that decides your school budget now. Town Meeting is not a ceremony. It can choose wrong, and the people in the room are the check on that.

Bog Iron, and the First Commercial Steel

Easton’s industrial history begins underfoot. The discovery of bog iron made the town part of an important iron producing region in southwestern Massachusetts in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first commercial steel made in the colonies is said to have been made in Easton, and it was evidently used for muskets. Long before any factory whistle, the ground itself was the town’s first industry.

The Shovel Works

In 1803 Oliver Ames moved here from Bridgewater and began manufacturing shovels in factories he built on the banks of the Queset River, which supplied the waterpower. His sons Oakes and Oliver II took over management in 1844. A disastrous fire in 1852 forced the company to rebuild in stone, and those stone shops still stand in North Easton.

The scale is the part that is hard to picture. In 1837 the works made shovels worth $108,000 with 84 workmen. By 1868 it was turning out 120,000 dozen shovels a year with 500 workmen and taking orders from Europe, Australia, South America, Africa and China. By 1875 it reported $1,500,000 of shovels at a rate of 450 dozen a day, and by 1879 shovels made in this town were three fifths of the world’s production.

They went everywhere. Ames shovels broke ground for the B and O railroad in Baltimore in 1828, dug the country’s first subway, which opened in Boston in 1897, and were used on the New York subways from 1899. During the California Gold Rush they were valuable enough in California to be used as currency. The company supplied trenching tools to the Union Army, and President Lincoln asked Oakes Ames personally to supply shovels for the Union cause. In 1929 Herbert Hoover, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison laid the cornerstone of Greenfield Village outside Detroit with an Ames shovel. And the shovels laid the Union Pacific Railroad, which is where the money and the trouble both came from. The company built shops and company housing, and the family’s estates kept large tracts of the town in open space, which is part of why roughly fifteen percent of Easton is dedicated conservation land today.

Credit Mobilier

The railroad money did not end cleanly, and the town’s own landmarks are named for the man it did not end cleanly for. Oakes Ames sat in the United States Congress from 1862 until his death in 1873. In 1865 he and his brother Oliver were drawn into the Credit Mobilier, the company formed to finance construction of the Union Pacific Railroad. The National Park Service’s account is plain about what followed: in the profit taking scandals that ensued the Ames brothers were embroiled, and those scandals ended Oakes Ames’s political career.

The library, the memorial hall and the railroad station in North Easton were built by that family with that money. Both things are true at once, and a town gets to hold both.

A Village Two Famous Men Built

In the late nineteenth century the Ames family did something unusual with the money: they hired the most celebrated American architect of the day, and the most celebrated landscape architect, and gave the results to the town. The National Park Service describes North Easton as the result of an extraordinary collaboration between Henry Hobson Richardson and Frederick Law Olmsted. In about eight years a small industrial village became a coherent planned town holding several of the century’s architectural landmarks.

Five Richardson buildings stand in it: the Oliver Ames Free Library, built 1877 to 1883; Oakes Ames Memorial Hall, 1879 to 1881; the Gate Lodge at Langwater, 1880 to 1881; the Gardener’s Cottage at Langwater, 1884; and the Old Colony Railroad Station, 1881 to 1884, which Frederick Lothrop Ames commissioned and gave to the railroad company and to North Easton, and which now houses the Easton Historical Society and Museum. Together with Olmsted’s landscapes they were designated the H. H. Richardson Historic District, a National Historic Landmark, on December 23, 1987. The nominated property is 5.8 acres.

The Rockery, the stone landscape in front of Memorial Hall, is Olmsted’s. He took a triangular plot that had sat empty since a Unitarian church was removed from it in 1876, and in a plan submitted in April 1882 laid out a rustic walk with seats and shade trees behind an unmortared fieldstone wall, arguing in his own specifications that the form of the rockwork suited it as a Civil War memorial for North Easton.

A Library, and Who Pays for It

The Ames Free Library opened in 1883 under the terms of the will of Oliver Ames II, which left $50,000 in trust to build and support a library for the inhabitants of Easton, with $15,000 of it set aside as a permanent fund. Richardson designed the main building in 1877. It is one of only four public libraries in Massachusetts he designed, alongside Malden, Quincy and Woburn. It is built of Milford granite with the same Longmeadow trim used on Trinity Church in Boston, and the very low cavernous arch over its doorway was the first time Richardson used that arch, which went on to become one of the most widely imitated features of his style. Stanford White designed the gargoyles and much of the interior woodwork, and the reading room mantelpiece carries a bronze relief of Oliver Ames II by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

Here is the civic part. That family money was the library’s only support until 1972, when the town began contributing so the library could qualify for state aid. And the Ames Free Library is still not a town department. It is a charitable corporation, governed by nine directors with equal votes: six elected by the corporation and three appointed by your Select Board. So three of the nine seats running Easton’s public library are filled by people the voters of this town elected.

A Hall Nobody Used

Oakes Ames Memorial Hall is worth one more paragraph, because of what did not happen in it. The Ames family hired Richardson to build the town a town hall and a library. The children of Oakes Ames commissioned the hall as a memorial to their father, Richardson took the commission in February 1879, and it was dedicated on November 17, 1881. Then the town would not take it. Dissent from other sections of Easton meant it was never accepted as the town hall, and it does not serve that purpose today. It went largely unused while Town Meeting kept meeting elsewhere, was later closed because its top floor could be reached by only one stair, and got a fire escape after 1950. It is a meeting hall again now. A town can be handed a building by the richest family in it and still vote, section by section, to say no.

Automobiles, Piano Machinery, and Soda Water

Through most of its history Easton kept a small industrial base that had nothing to do with shovels. The Easton Machine Company in South Easton made the Morse automobile between 1902 and 1914. There were cotton and thread mills, and machine shops making piano casings and piano machinery. Simpson Spring in South Easton is the oldest bottling company in the United States still on its original location: Frederick A. Howard began bottling spring water there commercially in 1878 and started making carbonated beverages two years later. And the village called Furnace Village is named for exactly what it sounds like, because cannons for George Washington’s army were cast at Perry’s Furnace and proofed along what is now Poquanticut Avenue. Despite all of it the town stayed largely rural in feeling, and suburban development after the Second World War brought in most of the residents who live here now.

The Schools and the College

The public high school is Oliver Ames High School, and the name is not decoration: the school itself was a gift from the Ames family, and the town kept the name in memory of that gift. The same family endowed trust funds for the school department, the highway department and for trees, and through that giving Easton became the second community in Massachusetts to have a public kindergarten, starting in the 1880s. Every Easton town election is held in the high school gym, which means most residents cast their ballots inside a building the shovel works paid for.

Stonehill College was founded in Easton on June 30, 1948 by the Congregation of Holy Cross, with Rev. George P. Benaglia, C.S.C. as its first president and its first students enrolled that September 20. It sits on a campus of about 375 acres. The town is also home to Southeastern Regional Vocational Tech, which gives secondary students an alternative to a traditional high school curriculum.