Lakeville, Massachusetts
A Short History of Lakeville
From a parish carved out of Middleborough, to a town named for its own broad chain of lakes, to the same open Town Meeting that still votes the budget today.
The Promised Land
Lakeville takes its name from the chain of broad, shallow lakes that cover roughly four thousand acres of the town, and long before it had that name residents called it something else: The Promised Land. The largest of the ponds, Assawompset, sits on the town’s edge and is the source of the Nemasket River, which runs north to feed the Taunton River. Water shaped this place before any town line did, and it still does: the Assawompset Pond complex is a protected water supply, watched over by the town’s own conservation commission and a herring fishery commission shared with Middleborough.
A Parish, Then a Town
Lakeville began as the western parish of Middleborough, settled on a larger scale in 1717. For more than a century its residents worshipped and did business as part of that larger town, but distance and their own growing numbers pushed them toward self-government. On May 13, 1853, Lakeville was incorporated as a separate town. The border between Lakeville and Middleborough exists because residents on both sides decided it should, which is the same power a Lakeville Town Meeting still holds today.
The Camp on the Pond
On Precinct Street sits Ted Williams Camp, and the name is not decoration. The Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer ran a summer baseball camp for boys on this ground, and the town later took it over as a public park. Today it is the civic center of Lakeville in the most literal sense: the town holds its open Town Meetings at Loon Pond Lodge there, and voters cast their ballots at the camp on election day. When Lakeville decides something big, it decides it on the grass where a baseball camp used to run.
A New Station on Bedford Street
Lakeville’s fire station on Bedford Street was built in 1894 and has served as the town’s firehouse since 1953. By 2022 a feasibility study found the building too small for a modern fire engine, its bays too tight and its layout out of date. Rather than let the problem drift, the town put a solution to a vote. At the Special Town Meeting on November 12, 2025, residents approved borrowing $21,409,960 for a new station by a wide margin, and chose to pay for it through a debt exclusion, a temporary tax the town votes on itself. A new station is going up now beside the police station, and it is the clearest recent proof of how this town still works: a room full of neighbors decided it.
Sources: Town of Lakeville, About Us (lakevillema.org); en.wikipedia.org, Lakeville, Massachusetts; Nemasket Week, fire-station coverage, 2025.