Lancaster, Massachusetts
A Short History of Lancaster
From the planting grounds of the Nashaway people, to the oldest town in Worcester County, to a February morning in 1676 that put Lancaster into one of the most widely read books in early America.
Nashaway
Long before any English settler arrived, this land along the river belonged to the Nashaway people, and the first English name for the place was theirs: Nashaway. English families began farming here in 1643, drawn by the meadows of the Nashua River, and for a decade the settlement went by that name. When you follow the Nashua through the center of town you are following the line that organised life here for generations before the town had a charter.
1653, and the Oldest Town in the County
Lancaster was incorporated in 1653, which makes it the oldest town in Worcester County. Its founder, John Prescott, had done the work of starting the settlement, and the residents wanted to name the town for him. The Massachusetts General Court refused, judging it presumptuous to name a town for a living man, and chose Lancaster instead, after Prescott’s home town in England. So the oldest town in the county carries the name of an English city that none of its first families came from, by order of a colonial legislature that would not flatter the man who built it.
February 1676
During King Philip’s War, on a February morning in 1676, Lancaster was raided and burned, and Mary Rowlandson, the wife of the town minister, was taken captive with her children. She was held for almost three months and then ransomed. The account she published afterward, of what she saw and endured, became one of the most widely read books in colonial America and a founding work in the genre of captivity narratives. It is hard history, and it is Lancaster’s: the town on the frontier of a violent war, told plainly by one of the people who lived through it.
The Parent Town
Old Lancaster was far larger than the town you live in. Over the seventeen and eighteen hundreds new towns were set off from its original grant, one boundary vote at a time, until the map filled in with the neighbors Lancaster borders today: Leominster, Clinton, Sterling, Bolton, Harvard, Shirley and Lunenburg. That is worth sitting with, because each of those borders exists the same way your town budget passes: a room full of residents voted for it, in the same form of open meeting Lancaster still uses.
The Meetinghouse on the Common
At the center of town stands the Common, and on it the First Church of Christ, built in 1816 to a design by the architect Charles Bulfinch. The church is a National Historic Landmark, and it is the building seven residents turned out to defend at a 2026 Community Preservation meeting. Two centuries on, the oldest building on the Common is still a live item on the town warrant.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancaster,_Massachusetts (settlement, incorporation, King Philip’s War, the First Church of Christ); National Park Service, National Historic Landmarks; U.S. Census Bureau.