Lincoln, Massachusetts
A Short History of Lincoln
From land nipped off three older towns, to the night a British patrol captured Paul Revere on a Lincoln road, to a town that turned its farms and woods into permanent open space.
Niptown
Lincoln began as an edge. Europeans settled the land in 1654 as part of Concord, and for a century the families who farmed the hills between Concord, Weston, and Lexington had to travel miles to worship and vote in whichever of those towns claimed them. In 1754 the Great and General Court let them incorporate a town of their own, stitched together from parts of all three. Because it was assembled from land nipped off its neighbors, Lincoln carried the nickname Niptown for years. The town takes its name not from a person but from a place: Chambers Russell, who helped create it, named it after his family’s home county of Lincolnshire in England, which makes Lincoln one of the few American towns named for the English county rather than for General Benjamin Lincoln or President Abraham Lincoln.
The Night the Alarm Rode Through
On the night of April 18, 1775, Paul Revere’s midnight ride ended in Lincoln. A British patrol stopped Revere on a Lincoln road and held him before letting him go on foot. Hours later, when the fighting began at Lexington and Concord, Lincoln’s minutemen were among the first to reach it, and the Battle Road that the British column retreated along runs straight through town. Five British soldiers who fell in Lincoln that day are buried in the town cemetery. The ground where all of this happened is now protected as part of Minute Man National Historical Park, so a Lincoln student can walk the same road the militia did.
A Town That Chose to Stay Small
For most of its history Lincoln was a farming town, close enough to Boston to sell milk and produce but rural in character. In the twentieth century, as suburbs spread across eastern Massachusetts, Lincoln made a deliberate choice to hold onto its open land. Working through its Town Meeting and a set of local land organizations, the town bought development rights, set aside conservation land, and kept large parts of its landscape as farm, forest, and wetland rather than house lots. That is why a town so close to the city still looks the way it does.
Art, Farms, and Wildlife
That preserved land is now home to institutions people drive from across the region to visit. The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum spreads modern sculpture across thirty acres of Lincoln hillside and is run today by The Trustees of Reservations. Mass Audubon’s Drumlin Farm is a working farm and wildlife sanctuary where children meet farm animals and native New England wildlife. Codman Community Farms, a town-owned working farm run by a nonprofit since 1973, still raises food on Codman Road. Together they make Lincoln a town where conservation is not an abstraction but a place you can walk into.
Sources: Wikipedia, Lincoln, Massachusetts (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln,_Massachusetts); National Park Service, Minute Man National Historical Park; U.S. Census Bureau.