Leicester, Massachusetts
A Short History of Leicester
From a hilltop grant of 1686, to the town whose mills once made a third of the hand cards in the country, to a library the voters willed into being twice, a hundred and fifty years apart.
A Hilltop Grant
The land that became Leicester was bought on January 27, 1686, when nine proprietors purchased it for 15 pounds. The town was incorporated on February 15, 1713, on a condition the colony wrote right into the act: 50 families had to settle the hills within seven years or the grant would lapse. The name came from Leicester in England. Leicester’s first selectman, Samuel Green, suggested it, because that English city was where his own father had come from. One early settler, Dr. Samuel Green, trained so many other physicians in the early 1700s that his household is remembered as the first medical school in Massachusetts.
A Third of the Nation’s Cards
Leicester’s fortune was built on a small, sharp thing: the hand card, a paddle set with rows of bent wire teeth, used to comb wool and cotton fibers straight before they could be spun into thread. By the 1780s the town’s mills were turning out about one-third of all the hand cards made in America. A century later, when the industry was already fading, Leicester was still producing roughly a third of all the hand and machine cards manufactured in North America. This was not a quiet farm town. It was a manufacturing center whose product traveled to every mill in the young country.
The Machine That Started an Industry
One Leicester man carried the town’s craft into the age of the factory. Pliny Earle built the first American carding machine, and then helped Samuel Slater equip the first successful textile mill in the United States, at Pawtucket, Rhode Island. That mill is usually marked as the start of the American Industrial Revolution, and a piece of it was made in Leicester. The town’s card-making know-how, in other words, did not just clothe a nation by hand. It helped invent the machinery that would do it at scale.
Leicester Academy
In 1784 the town chartered Leicester Academy, one of the oldest academies in Massachusetts, on the common at the center of town. Among the students who passed through it was Eli Whitney, who would go on to invent the cotton gin and to popularize the idea of interchangeable parts, one of the foundations of modern manufacturing. The academy’s long line eventually continued as Leicester High School, so the town has been educating its young people on the same ground for more than two centuries.
A Library the Voters Willed Into Being
On March 4, 1861, a Leicester town meeting voted, unanimously, to create a free public library. It was an ordinary meeting making an ordinary motion, and it committed the town to keeping a library for everyone, forever. More than a century and a half later their descendants renewed the promise. The 1896 library building was closed for a major restoration, and in June 2019 it reopened after $8.9 million of work, paid for with a state library construction grant and more than $3 million raised by residents themselves, including one anonymous gift of $2 million. Two votes, taken the same way in the same kind of room, a hundred and fifty years apart.
Sources: the Wikipedia article on Leicester, Massachusetts, and its cited references; the Town of Leicester; the Leicester Historical Society. Card-manufacturing figures are the town’s own widely documented account.