North Attleborough, Massachusetts
A Short History of North Attleborough
From Wampanoag land, to a jewelry town that armed the Continental Army with gold buttons, to the birthplace of a two-time Speaker of the U.S. House, to a town that rewrote its own government in 2019.
Before the Town
The land that became North Attleborough was Wampanoag country, part of a 1634 deed signed with the leader Wamsutta. English colonists folded it into the town of Attleborough, which was incorporated in 1694 and covered a large stretch of what is now the Rhode Island border region. For nearly two centuries North Attleborough was simply the northern part of that larger town.
A Town Built on Jewelry
North Attleborough’s fortune was gold. The story the town tells starts in 1780, when a French soldier set up a forge at the corner of Chestnut and South Washington Streets and made gold buttons for the Continental Army. That spark grew into an industry: by 1851 H. F. Barrows was manufacturing gold jewelry here, and the Attleboros together became one of the great jewelry-making capitals of the United States, drawing workers and immigrants to the factories that lined the town.
Splitting from Attleborough
By the 1880s the two halves of old Attleborough had grown apart, and in 1887 they formally separated. In a vote that still shapes the map, the larger East Attleborough village chose to keep the Attleborough name and the original 1694 founding date, leaving the rest of the old town to become the newly incorporated town of North Attleborough. That is why the neighbor next door is the older town on paper, even though the two share a single origin.
The Boy Who Became Speaker
In 1884 Joseph W. Martin Jr. was born in North Attleborough. He went from a local newspaper job to the Massachusetts legislature to the U.S. House of Representatives, which he served in from 1925 to 1967. Martin rose to lead his party in the House and twice held the most powerful job in the chamber, Speaker of the House, making a kid from a small jewelry town one of the most important political figures of mid-century America.
Memorial Park and the Modern Town
After the First World War the town set aside the 96.6-acre World War I Memorial Park to honor local veterans. Today it holds about two miles of trails and a small town-run zoo, with horses, goats, and deer, a genuinely unusual thing for a Massachusetts town to own. As jewelry manufacturing faded, North Attleborough grew into a bedroom-and-retail community along Route 1, still proud of the factories that built it.
Rewriting the Government
For most of its history North Attleborough governed itself the old New England way, by representative town meeting and a Board of Selectmen. As the town grew more complex, voters decided that system no longer fit. In 2019 they approved a new town charter that replaced town meeting and the selectmen with an elected nine-member Town Council and a professional Town Manager, the form of government the town runs under today.
Sources: Town of North Attleborough; Richards Memorial Library; U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art and Archives; The Sun Chronicle; U.S. Census Bureau.