A Short History of Millbury

The Name Is the Industry

The town is named for its mills. The Blackstone River runs through it, and through the Industrial Revolution that water turned the textile mills and factories that employed the villages around them. One of them, the S and D Spinning Mill, dates to the middle of the eighteenth century and is among the oldest continuously operated mills anywhere. Millbury sits at the top of the Blackstone River Valley, and the town has worked with the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor to clean the water up and open it to the public. The Blackstone River Bikeway runs north from Millbury to Worcester.

The Armory on the River

In 1808 two brothers, Asa Waters II and Elijah Waters, opened an armory on the banks of the Blackstone. Elijah died in 1814 and Asa carried the business alone, patenting improvements in gun manufacturing and working with the inventor Thomas Blanchard, whose lathe changed how interchangeable parts were made. The armory won arms contracts with the United States government, and that is the money that built the house on Elm Street.

The House the Town Almost Paved Over

Asa Waters II and his wife Susan commissioned a house in 1824. Ground was broken in 1826 and the family moved in during 1829. Alexander Parris and Asher Benjamin designed it, and Captain Lewis Bigelow built it. The Blackstone Valley National Heritage Corridor Commission calls it the finest example of Georgian Colonial style in the country, and it is listed on the National and State Registers of Historic Places.

The Town of Millbury bought the mansion in 1977. By 1994 it had decayed badly, and a proposal came forward to knock it down and put a parking lot on the site. Residents formed the Asa Waters Task Force instead. They raised the money, local tradesmen donated materials and labor, and restoration began in 1995. The town still owns the house, it is rented out for gatherings and weddings, and the Millbury Historical Society keeps its museum inside it. There is a civics lesson in that sequence worth holding onto: the demolition was a town decision, and so was the rescue, and residents with no title at all made the difference between them.

What the Town Built Next

The largest economic development project in Millbury’s history was finished in 2004, where Route 146 meets the Massachusetts Turnpike. The Shops at Blackstone Valley put more than 750,000 square feet of shopping and dining on that corner, with a fourteen screen cinema. The highway work that made it possible included a second Turnpike exit, which the town’s own About page describes as the change that opened easy access to both Worcester and Providence.

The Charter Is Not Finished

Millbury governs itself under a Home Rule Charter, and Town Meeting has rewritten parts of it in living memory. On May 3, 2022 the Annual Town Meeting passed Articles 19, 20, 23 and 25, which amended the charter’s articles on elected officers, on the Town Manager, on general provisions and on appointed officials, and every amended section in the published charter still carries its own citation to that night. If you want to know what a Town Meeting can actually do, that is the answer: it can change the rules the town is run by.

The History the Town Keeps Itself

The Millbury Historical Society holds the record: a hundred years of Aftermath yearbooks, photographs of the churches, the schools and the downtown, scrapbooks, research books, and exhibits on the town’s police and fire departments. Its museum is in the Asa Waters Mansion and it opens on scheduled afternoons and for events. It is a volunteer organization, which means the keeping of Millbury’s history is done by residents who decided to do it.