A Short History of Lunenburg

The Neighbour That Walked Out

Fitchburg is a city in its own right today, and until about 1764 it was part of Lunenburg. The reason it left is worth reading twice, because it is a civics lesson hiding inside a founding story: the settlers on that side of town found the walk to church and to town meetings too long, so they broke away and built their own town center. The distance to the room where the votes happen was enough, in 1764, to justify inventing a whole new town. Getting to the room has always been the hard part.

The Park on the Lake

For most of the twentieth century, Whalom Park sat on the shore of Whalom Lake, a noted amusement park whose roller coaster was called the Flyer Comet. It ran until 2000. The park is gone, but its name is not: the Whalom-Bakerville district is still written into the town’s own bylaws, and it is one of the four places the town is required to nail up the Town Meeting warrant.

Four Places the Warrant Goes Up

Here is a piece of Lunenburg’s government you can go and touch. Chapter 81 of the town bylaws says the warrant for every Town Meeting must be posted, as an attested copy, in at least four public places, one in each precinct, fourteen days before the meeting. The bylaw names them: Town Hall at 17 Main Street for Precinct A, the Whalom Variety Store at 423 Electric Avenue in the Whalom-Bakerville district for Precinct B, Powell Stone and Gravel at 225 Leominster-Shirley Road for Precinct C, and JAXX Country Variety at 1383 Massachusetts Avenue for Precinct D. A town hall, a variety store, a gravel yard and a country store. That is where the agenda for your town’s legislature is legally required to appear, and it is why the list has been amended over the years as businesses came and went.

2009: The Town Rewrote Its Own Government

Here is the piece of Lunenburg history that reaches furthest into your own life. In 2009 the Legislature enacted Chapter 113 of the Acts of 2009, the town’s Home Rule Charter, and Lunenburg took the Select Board and Town Manager form it runs on now. The town amended it again by Chapter 167 of the Acts of 2020.

What Lunenburg did NOT do is the interesting half. Many Massachusetts towns that hired a professional manager took offices off the ballot at the same time and handed them to the manager to appoint. Lunenburg kept thirteen bodies elective under charter section 3-1, the Town Clerk among them, along with the Board of Assessors, the Sewer Commissioners, the Park and Cemetery Commissioners and the Commissioners of Trust Funds. So the town has a professional administrator running its departments and a ballot that still fills thirteen kinds of seat. A charter can be amended the same way it was adopted, which means the balance is Town Meeting’s to revisit.

The Anniversary the Town Is Planning

On May 7, 2022, Town Meeting voted to establish the Lunenburg 300th Anniversary Committee to plan the town’s Tricentennial in 2028. That is a committee brought into existence by a vote of the residents in the hall, to mark three hundred years since the incorporation those same residents’ town charter still dates from. If you are in high school in Lunenburg now, you will be the age to run for a seat on something by the time it happens.