Holland, Massachusetts
A Short History of Holland
From a corner of South Brimfield, to a town cut out of Wales because a mountain sat in the way, to a lake that a mill company made on purpose. Holland has been governing itself by Town Meeting the whole time.
A Corner of South Brimfield
The first English settler here was Joseph Blodgett, who arrived in 1730, and for decades this land was simply the far eastern edge of a much larger town. It sat inside Brimfield, and then inside South Brimfield when that parish set up on its own. The people who farmed these hills had to travel a long way to have any say in the town that governed them, and that distance is the root of everything that follows.
Cut Loose from Wales, 1783
In 1775 the southern parish broke off from Brimfield and became the town of Wales. That did not solve Holland’s problem, because the town center of Wales lay across a mountain, and getting to a town meeting still meant a hard trip. So the residents on the Holland side asked to govern themselves, and on July 5, 1783 the Commonwealth made Holland its own town. The border you live inside exists because a group of farmers decided the distance to the meeting hall was too far, and voted to fix it.
The Name
The town took its name from Lord Holland, an English statesman who had supported the American colonies in their bid for independence. It is a small thing, a name chosen in 1783, but it tells you what the people here thought they were part of.
Farms, Cloth, and Brick
For most of its history Holland made its living three ways: farming the thin upland soil, weaving cloth, and firing brick from local clay. None of it made the town rich, and the population stayed small. It fell to a low point of about 137 people in 1930 before it began to climb again after 1940.
The Made Lake
The lake at the center of town was put there by a company. In the 1860s the Hamilton Woolen Company, whose mills ran downstream in Southbridge, dammed the Quinebaug River to store water for its machinery. The river backed up over farmland and filled a basin more than 400 acres wide, and it never drained. Today the Hamilton Reservoir is one of the larger reservoirs in southern New England, stocked each year with trout, and it shapes how nearly everyone in Holland lives, works, and spends a summer afternoon.
Fire, and a New Town Hall
Holland’s town hall was about two centuries old when it burned down in December 1995. The town rebuilt, and dedicated the new building on July 11, 1998, with Congressman Richard E. Neal on hand. The town that had shrunk to 137 people in 1930 counted 2,603 residents at the 2020 census, and it still settles its business the way it did in 1783: at Town Meeting, with the voters in the room.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland,_Massachusetts; Town of Holland Annual Town Report; U.S. Census Bureau.