Maynard, Massachusetts
A Short History of Maynard
From a dam on the Assabet River, to a town that bought its way free of its neighbors, to the mill that once made Maynard the minicomputer capital of the world.
The Mill on the Assabet
Maynard begins with water and wool. In 1846 and 1847 Amory Maynard, working with William Knight, bought the water rights to the Assabet River, threw a dam across it, and built a woolen and carpet mill on the bank. During the Civil War the mill wove cloth for Union army uniforms, and the village that grew up around it took its shape from the workday: rows of company housing, a mill pond, and a whistle that told a few thousand people when to start and when to stop. The town that exists today exists because of that mill.
1871: A Town of Their Own
For years the mill village sat awkwardly at the far edges of two other towns, part Stow and part Sudbury, and the people who lived there were tired of it. In 1871 they petitioned the Legislature to become their own town, and the state granted it on April 19. Becoming Maynard was not free: the new town paid its parent towns for the land it carried out with it, roughly $23,600 to Sudbury and $8,000 to Stow. They named the town for Amory Maynard, the mill owner whose enterprise had drawn them all there.
The Clock Tower
In 1892 Amory Maynard’s son Lorenzo gave the young town a gift that still keeps time over it: a clock tower on the mill, with a hand-wound movement that is among the oldest still running in the country. It is the town’s landmark and, in a way, its signature, a public clock raised by the family whose name the town carries.
From Wool to Woolen
The mill did not stay in one set of hands. It went bankrupt in 1898, and in 1899 the American Woolen Company bought it and ran it as one of the largest woolen operations in the country, drawing waves of immigrant workers to Maynard to run its looms. For a century the mill and the town rose and fell together, through booms, strikes, and the slow decline of New England textiles.
The Minicomputer Capital
When the wool finally left, computers moved in. In 1957 a new company called Digital Equipment Corporation rented a corner of the old mill, just 8,680 square feet for $300 a month. DEC grew into one of the largest computer companies in the world, bought the entire mill complex in 1974, and made Maynard, for a while, the minicomputer capital of the world. DEC stayed until 1998, when it was acquired by Compaq, and the mill that had made cloth for the Union army had by then made machines that helped build the modern computer industry.
Mill and Main
After DEC the mill kept reinventing itself. It was renamed Clock Tower Place from 2000 to 2015, and new owners renamed it Mill and Main Place in 2016. Today it holds offices, restaurants and small companies, and the clock still runs. A town that began as one mill village has kept the mill at its center for nearly two hundred years, which is a rare thing, and it is the first place to look if you want to understand Maynard.
Sources: Wikipedia, “Maynard, Massachusetts” (town incorporation, the Assabet mill, the clock tower, and the Digital Equipment Corporation years); U.S. Census Bureau.