Groveland, Massachusetts
A Short History of Groveland
From an East Parish of Bradford on the south bank of the Merrimack, to a town of its own in 1850, to a public park the town voted to buy for itself at Town Meeting.
The East Parish
English families settled this ground in 1639, on the south bank of the Merrimack River in what was then the East Parish of Bradford. Bradford itself had begun as part of Rowley, so for its first two centuries the land you live on was a corner of a larger neighbor. A parish was as much a unit of local life as a church: it collected its own money and ran much of its own business, and over time the East Parish grew far enough from Bradford’s center to want a town of its own.
A Town of Its Own, 1850
On September 9, 1850, the Commonwealth incorporated the East Parish of Bradford as the separate town of Groveland. The name is generally traced to the groves of trees that lined the river landscape. From that day Groveland ran its own affairs through an open Town Meeting, the same form of direct self-government it uses to set its budget today: every registered voter is a member, and the room decides.
A Revere Bell and a Hand-Pump Engine
Two objects tie the town to the Revolutionary generation. Groveland’s Congregational church holds a bell cast at Paul Revere’s own foundry, one of the small number of Revere bells still in use. The town also keeps a hand-pump fire engine built in 1798 and given the name Veto in 1850, the year the town was incorporated. Both are the kind of ordinary civic property that a small town keeps because its residents decided, meeting after meeting, that it was worth keeping.
The Veasey Park Vote
In 1996 the town faced a choice that open Town Meeting exists to make. The Veasey family estate, about fifty acres above the river, was for sale. At Town Meeting the voters agreed to put $160,000 of the town’s own money toward the roughly $954,000 price, with state grants and a family gift covering the rest. The land became Veasey Memorial Park, and the trails, meadows, and Great Hall are open to the public today because a room full of residents voted to make them so. It is the clearest local proof of what a Town Meeting vote can buy.
Sources: Wikipedia, Groveland, Massachusetts, with cited references; Veasey Memorial Park; U.S. Census Bureau.