Hardwick, Massachusetts
A Short History of Hardwick
From a settlement called Lambstown, to a hilltop common that has held the oldest fair in America since before the Revolution, to the mill villages of Gilbertville and Wheelwright.
Wombemessock and Lambstown
English settlers reached this part of the central Massachusetts hills in 1685, on land that was first recorded as Wombemessock and then, informally, as Lambstown. When the settlement was organized into a town in 1739 it took a more formal name, Hardwick, in honor of Philip Yorke, the 1st Earl of Hardwicke, an English nobleman. The town you live in was a working farming community from the start, spread across a landscape of hills, brooks, and the valley of the Ware River.
The Oldest Fair in America
In 1762 Timothy Ruggles introduced the Hardwick Fair, and it has been held nearly every year since, which makes it the oldest annual agricultural fair in the United States. From the beginning the town settled the fair’s affairs the way it settled everything else, in open town meeting, and the voters decided it should be held in the middle of the town, on the hilltop common at Hardwick center. More than 260 years later the fair is still on that exact grass every August, a decision ordinary residents made before the country existed and never unmade.
The Villages and the Mills
Hardwick is not one settlement but several: Hardwick center on its common, and the villages of Gilbertville, Wheelwright, and Old Furnace scattered across the town. In the late 1800s the mill villages, Gilbertville above all, grew up around textile and paper mills that drew workers and built rows of housing along the rivers. Both industries had left the area by the 1930s, and the town returned to the quieter, largely rural shape it keeps today, but the mill-village street grids and the brick mills are still part of the landscape.
Governed in the Room
From its earliest years Hardwick has governed itself in open town meeting, where every registered voter is a member and the budget and the bylaws are decided by the people who show up. That is not a museum piece. The same form of meeting that named the fair’s location in the 1760s still votes the school budget and the town’s spending today, which is why showing up in Hardwick has always been the whole lever of local power.
Reading and Remembering
The town built its civic life around its books and its history. Hardwick’s public library was established in 1892, and the Gilbertville library opened in 1913, so that both of the town’s main villages had a place to read. In 1961 residents founded the Hardwick Historical Society, which collects and preserves the town’s records and runs a museum on the common at Hardwick center, keeping the long memory of a town that has been meeting on that hill for a very long time.
Sources: Wikipedia, Hardwick, Massachusetts; the Hardwick Historical Society (hardwickmahistoricalsociety.org); the Hardwick Fair (hardwickfair.com); U.S. Census Bureau.