Holden, Massachusetts
A Short History of Holden
The north half of Worcester that became its own town in 1741, ten mill villages that still have their names, a reservoir that took the mills away, and two votes the town cast on itself that are still running the place.
1741, and the Half That Left
Holden did not begin as a town. It began as the northern half of Worcester, far enough from the meetinghouse that the settlement out there ran most of its own affairs anyway, and on January 9, 1741 it was incorporated as the Town of Holden. That is the pattern across most of eastern and central Massachusetts: a town is usually a piece of an older town that grew big enough to want its own vote. The land was farmed first, and for the first sixty years or so that was most of the story.
Ten Names on One Map
Ask someone where in Holden they live and you may not get an address. You may get Jefferson, or Chaffin, or Quinapoxet, or Springdale, or Eagleville. Between 1860 and 1900 the town’s own history counts ten villages that every resident could name: Chaffin, Unionville, Lovellville, Quinapoxet, Dawsonville, North Woods, Bryantville, Springdale, Eagleville and Jefferson. They were not neighbourhoods in the modern sense. They were settlements that grew around textile mills, which grew where the streams and rivers gave up water power, and the families who worked in them were largely immigrants arriving into a farming town that was changing fast.
The Summer Town on the Hills
At the same time the northwest of Holden turned into somewhere people went on purpose. The Jefferson section became a summer retreat for families escaping the heat of Boston and New York, and the hills filled with hotels: the Jefferson House, the Elmwood House, the Summit House, and the largest of all of them, the Mt. Pleasant House. Farms took in the overflow as boarding houses. Almost none of it survives. The golf course at Holden Hills Country Club is the only piece of the hotel era still on the ground.
The Water That Took the Mills
By the early 1900s most of the mills were gone, and the reason was not competition. It was the Quabbin and Wachusett Reservoirs, built to send drinking water to metropolitan Boston, which reshaped the watershed the mills ran on. The summer hotels went the same way, helped along by fire. After the Second World War Holden turned into what it mostly is now, a town where a great many people live and work somewhere else. The villages kept their names anyway.
September 1911: The Town Bought the Lights
Here is a vote worth knowing about. In September 1911 Holden Town Meeting established a municipal light department, and approved $600 to install an electric lighting system in the Town Hall, the Damon Memorial, two engine houses, the Rice School and the school house in Jefferson. The first electricity was delivered in January 1912. More than a century later the Holden Municipal Light Department is one of 40 municipal light departments in Massachusetts, it serves over 7,600 customers and only Holden customers, its annual sales exceed $13 million and about 100 million kilowatt hours, and the Board of Selectmen you elect sits as its Light Commissioners. A room of residents voted that into existence, and it is still the town’s.
1951 and 1954: The Town Rewrote How It Runs
Two decisions in four years shaped nearly everything on this site. In June 1951 the Legislature passed an act to establish the Selectmen and Town Manager form of government in the Town of Holden, and the voters accepted it at the ballot, making Holden one of the first communities in Massachusetts to hire a professional manager. That act is why the Town Clerk, the Planning Board and the Assessors here are appointed rather than elected, and why the person who writes the budget is not on any ballot. It has been amended three times since, by Chapter 679 of the Acts of 1973, Chapter 68 of the Acts of 1991 and Chapter 167 of the Acts of 2011.
Then in 1954 Holden joined what the town describes as the first regional school district in Massachusetts. That is the second decision, and it is the one a student feels most directly: the schools are shared with Paxton, Princeton, Rutland and Sterling, and their budget arrives in Holden as an assessment voted by a committee of sixteen where Holden fills six seats. Both of these were choices a town made about itself, and a charter can be amended the same way it was adopted.
The History the Town Keeps Itself
The Holden Historical Society, founded in 1967, collects, preserves, exhibits and interprets the documents and artifacts of the town’s history, and it is a volunteer organization that takes members. If you want to know what a mill village looked like, or which hotel stood where, that is where the evidence is.
Sources: Town of Holden, About Holden (holdenma.gov/167); Town of Holden, Town Charter, the 1951 Selectmen and Town Manager act as amended (holdenma.gov/530); Holden Municipal Light Department, About us (holdenma.gov/311); Holden Historical Society (holdenhistory.org); Town Clerk of Holden, Annual Town Election official results.