Hampden, Massachusetts
A Short History of Hampden
From Nipmuc berry hills called Minnechaug, to a parish that voted itself into a town in 1878, to the quiet home where one of America’s best-loved children’s authors wrote about the animals in his own backyard.
Minnechaug
Long before any English settler arrived, this land belonged to the Nipmuc people, and the wider Hampden and Wilbraham region was known as Minnechaug, which meant berry land or berry hill. The name fits the ground: hills, brooks, and wetlands, the kind of country better for gathering and hunting than for a harbor town. When Europeans came, they built along the same brooks and hillsides the Nipmuc had used for generations.
South Wilbraham
Hampden began as the southern parish of Wilbraham, settled around 1741 and known for more than a century as South Wilbraham. For most of that time its residents worshipped, farmed, and did public business as a part of Wilbraham, a day’s walk to the north. The distance mattered. A parish that had to travel to reach its own town meeting slowly built the case for governing itself.
1878, a Town of Its Own
On March 28, 1878, the Commonwealth incorporated Hampden as a separate town, set off from Wilbraham. The new town took its name from John Hampden, the English parliamentarian who refused to pay a tax King Charles I had imposed without Parliament’s consent, and who became a symbol of resistance to arbitrary power. It is a fitting namesake for a town that governs itself by open Town Meeting, where the people who show up still hold the final vote.
The Storyteller of Laughing Brook
Hampden’s most famous resident never held office. Thornton W. Burgess, the author and naturalist who created Peter Cottontail, Reddy Fox, and the animals of the Green Forest, made his home in Hampden and wrote more than 170 books and thousands of newspaper columns. He drew his stories from the woods and brooks around him. After his death in 1965, the Massachusetts Audubon Society took his property on Main Street and made it the Laughing Brook Wildlife Sanctuary, which still carries children into the same landscape that filled his books.
A Small Town, Kept Small
Hampden’s population has hovered under 5,000 for generations, held there partly by its own topography of hills and wetlands. It has stayed a town of a few thousand neighbors who know one another, run largely by volunteers on its boards and committees, with the Hampden Historical Society keeping the record in Old Academy Hall. In May 2025 that same town meeting tradition gave a closed school a second life, voting to move the town’s offices and library into the former Thornton W. Burgess School on Wilbraham Road.
Sources: Town of Hampden, About Us (hampdenma.gov); Massachusetts Audubon Society, Laughing Brook Wildlife Sanctuary; Wikipedia, Hampden, Massachusetts and Thornton W. Burgess; U.S. Census Bureau.