Marshfield, Massachusetts
A Short History of Marshfield
From a 1640 land grant on the Winslow family’s ground, to the farm of the most famous orator in America, to a country fair that has run every August since 1867 and once hosted the town meeting itself.
The Ground and the Names on It
The oldest dated thing in Marshfield is a boundary. In 1640 the Plymouth Proprietors granted fourteen acres on what is now Webster Street to William Thomas, and the Old Winslow Burial Ground on Winslow Cemetery Road, the oldest cemetery in town, dates from that same year. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Winslow name is still on the ground and on the Historic Winslow House, and the fourteen acres of the 1640 grant are still one parcel, still owned in common, and you can walk them.
Marshfield grew as a coastal farming town at the mouths of the North and South Rivers, and its geography did most of the deciding: marsh hay, harbors at Green Harbor and Brant Rock, and five miles of Atlantic shoreline. Two more of its burial grounds are dated on the town’s own records, Marshfield Hills Cemetery on Old Main Street in 1729 and the Two Mile Burial Ground on Union Street in 1801.
The Farmer of Marshfield
In 1832 Daniel Webster made Marshfield his home, and he stayed until 1852. Webster was one of the most powerful national political figures of his century, a senator and Secretary of State whose speeches were read aloud in schoolrooms across the country, and he liked to be called the Farmer of Marshfield. The town has never really let go of the name: the footer of the town’s own website still reads “Home of Daniel Webster.”
What makes this local rather than decorative is who owns the evidence. Webster’s law office, the actual building he worked in at his Green Harbor estate, is a National Historic Landmark, and the Town of Marshfield owns it. It has stood on the grounds of the Historic Winslow House, and the town has a project underway to move it back to its original place on the Webster Estate and open it to the public again. The estate itself, at 238 Webster Street, is also town property. Its Queen Anne style Victorian mansion was built in 1880 by Caroline Story White Webster on those same fourteen acres granted in 1640, and the town leases the property to the all-volunteer Daniel Webster Preservation Trust.
So a National Historic Landmark in this town is not somebody else’s museum. It is a town asset, and decisions about it are town decisions.
Nineteen Farmers and a Quarter
In 1862, with the Civil War on, nineteen Marshfield residents formed the South Marshfield Farmer’s Club so that people who grew things had somewhere to compare notes. They met once a week through the fall and winter, elected Cpt. John T. Dingley president, and set the dues at twenty five cents. By 1865 there were twenty nine of them.
That autumn they held a public meeting on the town common in front of the First Congregational Meeting House, and two hundred people came and brought what they had grown. The next year nine thousand came. In March 1867 the founders wrote a charter and incorporated as the Marshfield Agricultural and Horticultural Society, held their first meeting on June 6, and elected George M. Baker president. That same year the society bought the Wesleyan Meeting House and its land at 66 South River Street, which is still the society’s home and still where the Marshfield Fair is held every August.
Construction on the Exhibition Hall began in 1869. Three stories, built by the founders themselves, and it is still the centerpiece of the fairgrounds under the name Agricultural Hall. For many years the town meeting was held there, which means the room where Marshfield voted its own budget and the room where it judged its own livestock were, for a while, the same room.
A Bylaw the Town Wrote for Itself
Marshfield formed its Historical Commission in 1964 under Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 40, Section 8d. It is the official town historical body, seven members appointed by the Select Board to three-year terms, and it looks after the town-owned historic properties, including Webster’s law office.
Its most consequential work is a piece of law the voters passed themselves. The Commission wrote and sponsored a Demolition Delay Bylaw, and Marshfield voters approved it at the annual town meeting of 2008. It holds up the demolition of any building 75 years old or older that the Commission finds historically significant, for as long as a year, which is time enough to look for another answer. Two historic homes, an unusual barn, and parts of several outbuildings are still standing because of it.
That is the whole argument of this guide in one example. A group of residents drafted a rule, brought it to a room open to every registered voter in Marshfield, and the room passed it. Eighteen years later it is still deciding what gets torn down.
Sources: Town of Marshfield Historical Commission and the town’s own cemetery and community pages (marshfield-ma.gov); the Marshfield Agricultural and Horticultural Society’s published history of the Marshfield Fair (marshfieldfair.org); Town of Marshfield Charter and General Bylaws. Verified 2026.