Medfield, Massachusetts
A Short History of Medfield
From thirteen settlers who paid fifty pounds for meadow land on the Charles, to a self-taught writer who lobbied Congress for the country’s first copyright law, to a hat factory that paid for the library you can still walk into.
A Town Voted Into Existence
Medfield began inside Dedham. Dedham’s original territory stretched across what are now Norwood, Walpole, Norfolk, Wrentham, Franklin, Bellingham, Dover and Needham, and by 1640 Dedham men were riding out to cut the meadow grass along the Charles River to feed livestock back on the home farms. The place was called Dedham Village. Over the next decade families decided to stay, and in November 1649 a Dedham town meeting approved laying out an area for a new town. Thirteen original settlers paid fifty pounds to the inhabitants of Dedham for the land, and on June 2, 1651 Medfield was incorporated as the 43rd town in Massachusetts. The border you live inside was drawn by a vote at a town meeting, which is the same instrument that still votes your budget.
A School Before a Schoolhouse
Ralph Wheelock, a graduate of Cambridge in England, is considered the founder of Medfield and became its first schoolmaster. In 1655, four years after incorporation and eleven years before there was a building for it, the settlers voted fifteen pounds to establish a school, and it met in the homes of townspeople. The first schoolhouse went up in 1666 at the south corner of Janes Avenue and North Street. His name is still on an elementary school on Elm Street, which means a Medfield student today walks into a building named for the man who taught the town’s first class in somebody’s front room.
King Philip’s War
Half of Medfield’s homes were destroyed during King Philip’s War, which ran from 1675 to 1676, twenty-four years after the town was incorporated. The town rebuilt on the same ground. A marker for the war was unveiled during a recent Medfield History Weekend, and a minimum of three Medfield houses still standing date at least in part to the middle or late 1600s: the Peak House, the Dwight-Derby House and the Lowell Mason House.
Two Medfield Residents Who Changed the Law
Hannah Adams was born in Medfield in 1755 and lived at 49 Elm Street. Almost entirely self-taught, she became the first female American author to make a living from writing, and she lobbied for the first United States copyright law, which passed in 1790. Every copyright notice you have ever seen traces back to a statute a Medfield woman argued for.
Ellis Allen was born in Medfield in 1792 and lived at the Allen Homestead at 260 North Street, which stands today as a historical landmark on the Underground Railroad. He heard William Lloyd Garrison lecture in Boston, befriended him, and began holding anti-slavery meetings at his own house on North Street. Frederick Douglass spoke there. Allen housed, clothed and fed people escaping slavery on their way to Canada, and the law of the day fined him one hundred dollars for doing it.
Hats, Nails and a Library
Medfield became home to the second largest straw and felt hat factory in the United States, alongside makers of cut nails, forks, boots, wire, boxes and horse-drawn carriages. In 1917 Granville Dailey, one of the owners of that hat factory, gave the town its library as a memorial to his wife and daughter, designed by the architect William G. Perry, and asked that space always be kept in it for the Medfield Historical Society. The Society sat in the library’s back room from 1917 until 1968, when the two traded rooms: the Society moved into the old bank building at 6 Pleasant Street, where its vault now holds the town’s most valuable items, and the library took the space for an expansion. A $3.2 million project rebuilt the library again in the 1990s, and the new 18,876 square foot building was dedicated on May 3, 1998.
Painters, Musicians and a Steep Roof
From the mid-1800s Medfield drew celebrated artists and musicians. Dennis Miller Bunker, an innovator of American Impressionism and part of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s circle, summered at Tannery Farm at 663 Main Street; his painting Roadside Cottage shows a house at 661 Main Street and hangs today in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Down the road at 347 Main Street stands the Peak House, built in 1711, one of the earliest surviving examples of post-Medieval English architecture in the country and the only free-standing structure of its kind in the United States. It had deteriorated badly by 1923, and the Historical Society, a grassroots campaign and a donation from the hat factory’s president saved it.
The Hospital, and Buying It Back
Medfield State Hospital opened in 1896 and dominated the north-west corner of the town for most of a century. In 2014 the town decided to buy a piece of it back. At a Special Town Meeting on March 10, 2014 the voters appropriated three million one hundred thousand dollars by the two-thirds majority the law requires, and three weeks later, at the annual town election of March 31, 2014, they voted the debt exclusion that made the borrowing possible. The town’s own account says the ballot measure passed overwhelmingly. That is 134 acres, bought from the Commonwealth by two votes of the residents. In 2022 the town signed a Land Disposition Agreement with Trinity Financial for redevelopment of about 45 acres north of Hospital Road, keeping for itself the areas known as the Green, the Arboretum, the North Field and the Water Tower Parcel.
Sources: the Medfield Historical Society (Medfield’s Town History, Notable People, Historical Society Beginnings); the Medfield Public Library (About and Our History); the Peak House Heritage Center; the Town of Medfield’s Medfield State Hospital pages and its 2014 Annual Town Report; U.S. Census Bureau.