Freetown, Massachusetts
A Short History of Freetown
From a 1659 land purchase from the Wampanoag, to a shipbuilding river town, to the two villages of Assonet and East Freetown that share one open Town Meeting today.
Ye Freemen’s Purchase
Long before any English settler arrived, this land belonged to the Wampanoag. In 1659 twenty-six colonists received it in the transaction remembered as Ye Freemen’s Purchase, tracts that took in present Freetown and Fall River as far south as the Quequechan River.
Incorporated in 1683
Freetown was incorporated as a town in July 1683, and its first company of militia was formed the same year. Two villages grew up inside its borders and still define it: Assonet in the north, along the river, and East Freetown in the south. In 1747 the town took in the parts of Tiverton that lay in the Massachusetts Bay Province. When a voter today says at Town Meeting whether they come from Assonet or East Freetown, they are naming a division that is older than the country.
The Town That Became Two
Old Freetown was much larger than the town you live in, because its southern end was part of it. In 1803 that end broke away and incorporated on its own as Fall River, which soon grew into a mill city. The line between Freetown and Fall River exists because that was decided by people acting through their towns, in the same form of self government that still votes your budget.
Minute Men and Mills
When the alarm from Lexington reached the coast on April 19, 1775, three companies of Freetown Minute Men turned out and marched, and then served with the Continental Army. In the century that followed, the water power of the Assonet River ran the town’s grist, saw, and fulling mills, and shipyards along the river built sloops and schooners. The last ship was launched here in 1848, when demand for larger vessels outgrew the shallow depth of the river. For a time one of the state’s first trout hatcheries operated in Freetown, and by the 1870s railroad dining cars and ocean liners were serving Freetown trout.
Keeping the Record
In 1969 a small group of residents founded the Freetown Historical Society to preserve the town’s history, and it has grown into a village of more than ten buildings on about eleven acres at 1 Slab Bridge Road in Assonet. Between the society’s collection, the town’s own records, and the Guilford H. Hathaway Library, Freetown keeps a long memory for a town of its size, and much of that record is open to any student who asks.
Sources: Town of Freetown, About Us (freetownma.gov); the Freetown Historical Society (freetownhistoricalsociety.org); U.S. Census Bureau.
MassCivics last checked this page on October 20, 2026.
Sources
- Town records: Town of Freetown, About Us, as of October 2026.
- History and incorporation: Secretary of the Commonwealth, MHC Reconnaissance Survey Town Report, Freetown (1981), as of December 1, 1981.