Gardner History

Before There Was a Gardner

In 1774 there was no such place. The land that is now Gardner was a set of tracts belonging to Ashburnham, Winchendon, Westminster and Templeton, stitched together by three roads that were hard to travel in good weather and close to impossible in bad. People who lived there could not reliably get to a church or a store through a New England winter, and that practical problem is what started the paperwork.

In 1785 a petition was written, enough signatures were gathered, and the township was granted. The new town was named for Colonel Thomas Gardner, who had been mortally wounded at the battle of Bunker Hill ten years earlier. Seth Heywood, one of the men who signed the petition, had fought alongside him there. The Heywood name stayed with the town: it is on the furniture company, the hospital and the public library to this day.

An Idea That Left Gardner and Entered the Language

In 1888 an employee of Gardner’s largest furniture manufacturer, Edward G. Watkins, built a device to record the hours his fellow workers put in. It was simple enough to use that he called it Simplex. The habit it created gave American English the phrase punching the clock. Watkins opened the Simplex Time Recorder Co. in 1901 and kept working for Heywood Brothers until 1918, when he left to run his own company full time.

The city was growing hard around him. Electricity arrived in Gardner in 1891, and in September 1894 the Gardner Electric Railway began running a circuit of about three and a half miles through the town, which opened up where people could live and where a business could sensibly open. The Gardner News had written in 1879 that few towns in the Commonwealth had enjoyed such undisturbed prosperity in growth, and that more houses had gone up in Gardner that year than in any other town of its size in the state.

From Town Meeting to Mayor and Council

Gardner governed itself by town meeting for well over a century. In 1919 a town meeting formed a committee to build a memorial to the residents who had served in the Great War, and by 1920 that committee had decided the memorial should take the form of a new town hall. Gardner stopped being a town on January 1, 1923, when it became a city under a charter the Legislature enacted in 1921 and the town’s voters accepted on March 6, 1922.

That change is the reason this guide looks the way it does. A town meeting is a room any registered voter can walk into and vote in. A city replaces it with people you elect to vote on your behalf: a Mayor with a two year term, and a City Council of eleven, five of them elected by ward and six at large. Gardner’s charter has been amended many times since, most recently in 2025, but the basic bargain it struck in 1923 is the one the city still runs on.

The Biggest Decision of the Last Ten Years

In this century the largest thing Gardner has built is a school. The city replaced two aging elementary buildings, the Waterford Street Elementary School and the Elm Street Elementary School, with a single new school for Pre-K through grade 4 on Pearl Street. The Massachusetts School Building Authority approved a grant of up to $49,224,948 toward a project the district budgeted at $89,558,570 when the grant was voted in August 2019, at a reimbursement rate of 80 percent.

Read those two numbers next to each other and you have a civics lesson in one line. The state paid the larger share, and Gardner still had to find the rest, which meant a vote by people whose names are on the City Council page of this guide. Every big building a city puts up works this way: a state program covers a percentage, and the local share is a decision made in public by people you elect.

Where to Look Next

• The city’s own history. Gardner publishes its account of its founding, its industry and its growth at gardner-ma.gov.
• The Gardner Museum, Inc. keeps the city’s own record of the furniture industry and the people who worked in it.
• The Levi Heywood Memorial Library holds local records and local newspapers, and a library card costs a resident nothing.
• Mount Wachusett Community College has been part of the city’s answer to what comes after the factories.