Millville, Massachusetts
A Short History of Millville
From Nipmuc land along the Blackstone River, to a village built around mills and a canal, to the second youngest town in Massachusetts.
Along the Blackstone
Long before any English settler arrived, this land was Nipmuc territory, part of a homeland that stretched across central Massachusetts. Millville was first settled by colonists in 1662, on ground that sloped down to the Blackstone River. The river, and later the canal beside it, would shape everything about how the place grew.
Mills and the Canal
Millville grew around a succession of mills, and whole neighborhoods went up to house the people who worked in them. The Blackstone River powered the machinery, and the Blackstone Canal, dug in the 1820s to carry freight between Worcester and Providence, ran right through the village. A well-preserved lock from that early-nineteenth-century canal still stands in town. Today Millville lies inside the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor, which Congress created to protect the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution.
A Town of Its Own, 1916
For most of its history Millville was a village inside the town of Blackstone. In 1916 its residents petitioned the Massachusetts Legislature for permission to separate and run their own affairs, and they won. That makes Millville the second youngest town in the Commonwealth. It is a useful fact to sit with: the line on the map between Millville and Blackstone exists because people asked for the power to govern themselves, in the same form of town meeting that still votes Millville’s budget today.
The Town on Record
Millville’s Central Street Historic District and Main Street Historic District are both listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the town keeps a historic Friends Meetinghouse from its Quaker past. The population tells the story of the mills: about 2,224 people in 1920, down to 1,567 by 1960 as the factories wound down, and back up to 3,174 at the 2020 census as the town became a place people commute from rather than work in.
A Hall of Famer from Millville
Millville’s best-known son grew up here in the early twentieth century. Gabby Hartnett learned his baseball in town before going on to a Hall of Fame career as a catcher for the Chicago Cubs, whom he joined in 1922. For a town of a few thousand people, a plaque in Cooperstown is no small thing.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau (decennial census); the Town of Millville; en.wikipedia.org (Millville, Massachusetts; Central Street Historic District; Main Street Historic District).