A Short History of Longmeadow

1783: First in Line

Here is a fact worth carrying around. Longmeadow was the first community to be incorporated into the Commonwealth of Massachusetts immediately following the Revolutionary War, in 1783. Not the first town in Massachusetts, which is a much older contest, but the first one the new Commonwealth admitted once the fighting stopped and the state constitution of 1780 was running. The town puts it in one sentence on its Town Seal page, and the date is on the seal itself.

The seal also carries the town’s own account of what this place was made of. A beaver pelt stands for the first industry in the town’s economy. A gilded cock on a church spire stands for the role religion played in its early development. And the lower half of the shield is the Red House on the green, built in 1734, standing in for the many eighteenth century houses still on the ground here. The seal was designed and donated by a resident, Wallis Sturtevant.

1894: The Town That Became Two Towns

Look closely at the top of the seal and it is divided into two sections. The town explains why: those two halves signify the 1894 divisions of the Township. You can still see what that division produced. East Longmeadow is a separate community today, with its own government, its own school district and its own school enrollments, and the state representative district drawn today covers all of Longmeadow but only part of East Longmeadow.

That shape is everywhere in Massachusetts. A settlement grows far enough from the meetinghouse that governing it as one town stops making sense, and a new town line gets drawn. Longmeadow is on both sides of that story: it became a town of its own in 1783, and a hundred and eleven years later its own map was divided.

2004: The Town Rewrote Its Own Government

Here is the piece of Longmeadow history that most directly affects you, and it happened inside the lifetime of anyone reading this. In May 2004 the voters approved a new Home Rule Charter. It reorganized the town and created a full-time position that had never existed here before: a Town Manager, appointed by the Select Board, serving as the chief administrative officer and responsible to the board for the proper administration of all town affairs. Robin Crosbie became the first person to hold the job on March 1, 2005.

The trade was deliberate. A professional administrator running the departments full time, hired by and answerable to a board you elect, instead of five part-time elected officials trying to run a town between meetings. The charter has been revised twice since, in 2007 and 2019, and the Select Board put a Charter Review Committee to work in May 2017 that met twenty times and filed its report on October 9, 2018. A charter can be amended the same way it was adopted, which means this is a question Town Meeting can reopen.

The Record This Town Keeps of Its Own Spending

Most towns do not publish this. Longmeadow keeps a public table of every Proposition 2 1/2 question it has ever put to its voters, twenty seven of them, running from a $266,459 operating override that failed on March 8, 1983 to a $1,541,000 field improvement that passed on June 11, 2019. Read down it and you can watch a town argue with itself for forty years. A new public works building failed in 1988 and a rebuilt one passed in 2017. School additions failed in April 1999 and passed seven months later. Three separate school overrides went down on a single day in May 2005. The largest number on the list is $77,969,388 for the Longmeadow High School addition and renovation, which passed on June 8, 2010.

That table is a civics document as much as a financial one. It is the record of a town deciding, over and over, in public, what it would pay for.

The History the Town Keeps Itself

The Longmeadow Historical Society held its first organizational meeting on June 3, 1899, and by November of that year it had papers of incorporation and its first elected officers. It is an independent 501(c)(3), not a town department, and it keeps the town’s manuscripts and collections and runs the Storrs House Museum at 697 Longmeadow Street, next door to the library. It also runs Longmeadow Revolution 250, the town’s project for the 250th anniversary of the Revolution, which the town links from its own homepage.

The library next door carries a name for a reason. In 1907 Sarah Storrs, a descendant of Longmeadow’s first two ministers, Stephen Williams and Richard Salter Storrs, died and left her real estate and $5,000 to establish a town library. That is how a private bequest and a public vote end up in the same building: the bequest founded it, and the town’s voters approved a $2,000,000 debt exclusion in 1989 to add to it.

The Historical Commission and the Historic District Commission are the town’s own bodies for the same work, and residents sit on both.