Millis, Massachusetts
A Short History of Millis
From a corner of colonial Medway, to a mill town on the Charles River, to the birthplace of one of the first national brands of ginger ale, Millis has been settling its own business in Town Meeting for a very long time.
East Medway
The land that is now Millis was first settled by English colonists around 1657, and for its first century it was part of other towns: first Dedham, then Medfield, and after 1713 the eastern half of Medway, known plainly as East Medway. For generations the people here did much of their public business separately from the rest of Medway, and eventually they decided to make the arrangement permanent. That is the whole story of how a town is born in Massachusetts: not by a distant decree, but by residents who choose to govern themselves.
1885, and a Town of Its Own
Millis was incorporated as a separate town on February 24, 1885. It took its name from Lansing Millis, a railroad executive and local benefactor whose money and influence helped bring the new town about. From its first year Millis governed itself the way it still does, through an open Town Meeting where every registered voter is a member, which means the form of government you can walk into today is older than almost everything else in town.
Mills, Shoes, and Ginger Ale
Like most towns along the Charles, Millis ran on water power and small factories. Early mills and the Herman Shoe Company gave the town its working backbone, and the shoe works turned out military boots during two wars. The name that traveled furthest, though, was fizzy: the Clicquot Club Company, founded in Millis, bottled and distributed one of the first national brands of ginger ale in the United States, and it did so for roughly eighty years. For a small town, that is a long reach.
The River and the Swamp
Geography still shapes the town. The Charles River and Bogastow Brook run along its edges, and the wide Great Black Swamp, hundreds of acres of wetland, separates Millis from Medway to this day. Those wetlands are part of why the town looks the way it does, and protecting them is one of the jobs that the Conservation Commission and Town Meeting still take up, in the same room where the town has always decided things.
Sources: Wikipedia, “Millis, Massachusetts”; town of Millis annual reports; U.S. Census Bureau.