Hopedale, Massachusetts
A Short History of Hopedale
From a utopian commune founded on an idea, to the largest loom works in America, to an independent town that still votes its own future one meeting at a time.
A Utopia Inside Milford
Hopedale did not begin as a town. It began as an argument about how people ought to live. In 1841 the minister Adin Ballou and a group calling themselves the Practical Christians established the Hopedale Community on land inside what was then Milford, and settled it in 1842 as a joint venture built on Christian and socialist ideals: shared ownership, nonviolence, and equality. For fourteen years the community farmed, built mills, and governed itself by discussion and vote. The name they chose, Hopedale, was a statement of intent.
1856: The Drapers Buy the Dream
The community’s finances did not match its ideals, and in 1856 it went bankrupt. Two of its own members, the brothers Ebenezer and George Draper, purchased its assets and turned the little settlement toward manufacturing. What followed was a company town in the fullest sense: the Draper family’s loom works grew until the Draper Corporation was the largest maker of textile looms in the United States, and the family built the village around it.
The Company Town
You can still read the Draper era off Hopedale’s streets. Town Hall, designed and funded by George Draper and built of Milford granite and sandstone, was dedicated in 1887. The Bancroft Memorial Library was a gift too, and the marble sculpture inside it was paid for by the Drapers and shipped from Rome in 1904. In 1899 the family began the acquisition of the Hopedale Parklands, a 275 acre reserve around Hopedale Pond laid out with a design from the landscape firm of Frederick Law Olmsted. The town’s own parks page still calls the pond and parklands the crown jewels of the town.
1886: A Town of Its Own
By the 1880s the village around the loom works had its own identity, its own institutions, and its own money, and in 1886 Hopedale incorporated as a separate town, ending its decades inside Milford. The borders it drew then still trace the world the Community and the Drapers built.
After the Looms
Rockwell International acquired the Draper Corporation in 1967, and on August 29, 1980 the Hopedale factory closed. The great plant stood mostly empty for four decades before demolition began in July 2020. The company town outlived the company: the schools, the library, the Parklands, and the town government the Drapers’ village built are all still running, funded and governed now by the votes of the people who live here.
The Vote That Bought 130 Acres
Hopedale’s civic muscle did not retire with the mills. In October 2020 a Special Town Meeting voted unanimously to spend $1.175 million to buy 130 acres of forest on West Street rather than let a railroad turn the land into a freight yard, and the town has defended that vote in court in the years since. Whatever the outcome, the mechanism is the lesson: in this town, a room full of registered voters can decide what happens to 130 acres, and then the town carries that decision forward on their behalf.
Sources: Wikipedia, Hopedale, Massachusetts, with its cited sources; the Town of Hopedale, hopedale-ma.gov; Town Historian Dan Malloy’s Hopedale history site.