Hanson, Massachusetts
A Short History of Hanson
From a parish of Pembroke to a town named for a champion of the free press, and from cranberry bogs that fed a national brand to a lakeside camp its own voters chose to buy.
A Parish Becomes a Town
The land that is now Hanson was first settled by Europeans in 1632 as the western parish of Pembroke, and for almost two centuries the people here worshipped, farmed, and did their public business as part of that larger town. In 1820 the parish incorporated as Hanson, a town of its own. It took its name from Alexander Contee Hanson, a Maryland newspaper publisher and United States Senator who was remembered as a defender of free speech and a free press, which is a fitting namesake for a town that still settles its business in an open meeting where anyone may speak.
Cranberry City
Hanson’s low, wet ground turned out to be ideal for cranberries, and by the late nineteenth century the bogs had made the town a center of the industry. Ocean Spray grew its early operations from Hanson bogs before the cooperative moved to Plymouth in 1977, and the cranberry trade earned Hanson the nickname Cranberry City. You can still read that history in the landscape: many of the town’s ponds and open spaces are old bogs, and the state’s Burrage Pond Wildlife Management Area, which Hanson shares with Halifax, was cranberry land before it was conservation land.
The Camp the Town Bought
On the shore of Maquan Pond stands Needles Lodge, built for the industrialist Albert Cameron Burrage between 1899 and 1905 as the centerpiece of a summer estate called The Needles. In 1922 the property passed to the Camp Fire Girls, who ran it as a camp for decades. Then in 1979 the Town of Hanson voted at Town Meeting to buy the whole property, and Camp Kiwanee has been public land ever since, a lakeside function hall and campground that the town owns because residents in a room decided it should. Needles Lodge joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.
The Hospital on Bonney Hill
From 1919 to 1992 the Plymouth County Hospital, a tuberculosis sanatorium, stood on Bonney Hill overlooking the town. The building came down in 2017, and what becomes of the land is still the work of a town committee, which is a reminder that even a long-closed institution stays a live question as long as residents keep deciding its future.
On the Line to Boston
Hanson sits on the Kingston Line of the commuter rail, and the historic South Hanson depot still stands beside the modern MBTA Hanson station. The railroad is part of why a cranberry town gradually became a commuter one, tying Hanson to Boston and shaping the residential town that voters govern today.
Sources: Hanson, Massachusetts and Camp Kiwanee (Wikipedia); Camp Kiwanee history (officialcampkiwanee.com); U.S. Census Bureau. Accessed 2026.