A Short History of Hudson

A Shoe Town on a River

Everything here starts with the Assabet. The earliest settlers put a gristmill on its north bank and later a sawmill and a bridge, and the shoe shops that followed made Hudson a factory town rather than a farming one. The workforce that filled them came from everywhere. By 1928 nineteen languages were spoken by the workers of the Firestone-Apsley Rubber Company, in a town of a few thousand people. Hudson’s Portuguese American community traces itself to at least 1886, when a man named Jose Maria Tavares arrived, and the Tavares name is still on a meeting room in the public library. Look at the census figure on the demographics page, 22.5 percent of residents speaking a language other than English at home, and you are looking at the same story a hundred and forty years later.

The Fourth of July, 1894

On July 4, 1894, two boys playing with firecrackers started a fire that burned forty buildings and five acres of central Hudson. The downtown you can walk through today is what the town built afterward, which is worth knowing the next time somebody tells you a place has always looked the way it looks.

1897: The Town Bought the Lights

Three years after the fire, Hudson did something most Massachusetts towns never did. It founded its own electric utility. The Hudson Light and Power Department dates itself to 1897, and one of the first arguments for bringing electricity to town was simply the ability to light the streets. More than a century later it still belongs to the town and serves more than 13,000 customers, and the three people who oversee it are elected by Hudson voters on the annual town ballot. Very few voters anywhere in Massachusetts get to mark a ballot for the people who run their electric company. Hudson voters do, every year one of the three seats comes up.

1905: A Librarian Wrote a Letter

The Hudson Public Library has served the town since 1867, and by 1903 it had outgrown its room in the town hall. Grace Whittemore, the librarian, wrote to Andrew Carnegie and asked him to pay for a new building. He sent $12,500. The library at Wood Square opened to the public in November 1905, gained a second floor in 1929, and gained a two story addition in 1966 to mark the town’s hundredth birthday. One person wrote one letter and changed the shape of a downtown. That is not a metaphor for civic action. It is an example of it.

1978, 2021, 2025: The Town Rewrote Its Own Government

Here is the piece of Hudson history that most directly affects you. On May 8, 1978 the voters adopted a new home rule charter, written by a nine member Charter Commission the voters had themselves elected the year before. It kept the open town meeting, made the elected board the chief executives of the town, and created a professional administrator called the Executive Assistant whose appointing power was deliberately limited to department heads, and then only with the board’s approval.

The town has amended that charter three times since, and each amendment took a Town Meeting vote followed by an act of the Legislature. In 1979 it changed how often Town Meeting sits. On May 1, 2021 it turned the Board of Selectmen into the Select Board, enacted as Chapter 114 of the Acts of 2021. On May 5, 2025 it renamed the Executive Assistant the Town Manager, enacted as Chapter 130 of the Acts of 2026. The powers of the office did not change in 2025. The name did, and it took a vote of the town and a vote of the state to do it.

That is the most useful thing to know about how Hudson works. The rules of its government are not handed down from anywhere. They are a document the voters wrote, and Town Meeting can reopen it the same way it opened it.

The History the Town Keeps Itself

The Hudson Historical Society collects and preserves the objects and records of the town, and the Hudson Public Library keeps a local history collection about Hudson and its residents that anyone can walk in and use. The Historical Commission and the Historic District Commission are town bodies, which means their work runs through the same public meetings and the same Community Preservation money that Town Meeting votes one project at a time. The preservation of Hudson’s history is itself decided in the room where every registered voter can stand up.