Georgetown, Massachusetts
A Short History of Georgetown
From a farming parish of old Rowley called New Rowley, to a nineteenth-century shoe town, to the open Town Meeting that still votes your budget today.
New Rowley
Georgetown began as the western parish of Rowley, one of the early Essex County towns. Rowley itself was settled in 1639 by a company of Yorkshire families led by the Reverend Ezekiel Rogers, who had sailed from a town called Rowley in England. The land they were granted was large, and it later became not only Rowley and Georgetown but Groveland, Byfield and part of Boxford. For two centuries the western settlement was known simply as New Rowley.
The First Settlers
John Spofford became the first permanent settler in the western part of Rowley in 1669. Not long after, Samuel Brocklebank made his home here; he died in 1676 at the Battle of Sudbury during King Philip’s War, and the Brocklebank homestead built in 1685 still stands as a museum kept by the Georgetown Historical Society. These are not distant abstractions. They are houses you can walk past, on ground that has been governed by town meeting the whole time.
A Town of Its Own, 1838
By the 1830s the West Parish had grown large enough, and far enough from Rowley’s center, that it wanted its own town government. On February 27, 1838, New Rowley was incorporated as the separate town of Georgetown. That act is the reason there is a Town Meeting here at all: it created a town, and a Massachusetts town governs itself in a hall where any registered voter may stand and vote.
The Shoe Town
Through the nineteenth century Georgetown made shoes. The work began in small backyard workshops the size of a shed, so common that people called them ten-footers, and then moved into factories as the trade grew. One local touch of ingenuity became part of the national story: Paul Pillsbury of Georgetown invented a machine early in the 1800s that mass-produced the wooden pegs that held a shoe together, a small piece of the mechanization that would reshape American manufacturing.
Peabody’s Gift
In 1856 the town built its Town Hall, and in 1905 it gained the building many residents still think of first: the Peabody Library, funded by the London banker and philanthropist George Peabody, whose mother had been born in Georgetown. Peabody’s name is on libraries and institutions across two continents, and Georgetown holds one of them because of a family tie to this ground.
Land the Town Voted to Keep
The story is not only in the past. In June 1997 a Georgetown Town Meeting voted to buy the 44 acres of woods, trails and pond frontage at Camp Denison, and the town took title early the following year. The land is open to the public from dawn to dusk and looked after today by the Friends of Camp Denison under the Conservation Commission. It is a plain illustration of how this town works: neighbors in a room, an article on the warrant, and a piece of the town that now belongs to everyone.
Sources: the Georgetown Historical Society town history; the U.S. Census Bureau; the Friends of Camp Denison.