North Reading, Massachusetts
A Short History of North Reading
A land grant across a river, two centuries of farms and mills, a shoe trade that ended with a war, and a town that has been voting its own budget in a room since 1853.
The Land North of the River
North Reading began as somebody else’s land grant. In 1651 the town of Reading received a special grant of territory north of the Ipswich River, and families started farming it. Six households had settled there before 1680. For its first two centuries this was a farming community with a little hop growing, the kind of place measured in acres rather than in streets, and the river between it and Reading is the reason it eventually became a town of its own.
Mills, and Then a Town
The mills came first. There was a sawmill on Lob’s Pond by 1694, and grist and saw mills at the village center by 1794. A mill is a small piece of infrastructure with a large effect: it turns a farm’s output into something you can sell, and it gives a scattered settlement a center. By the middle of the nineteenth century the north parish had enough of a life of its own to be separated, and in 1853 North Reading was incorporated as a town. That is the date the town carries, and it is the year this place started running its own Town Meeting.
The Shoe Sheds
Small scale boot and shoe making was under way here by 1820, and by 1850 a shed or shop to make shoes was attached to almost every house in town. This is worth being exact about, because it is the uncomfortable part of the story. Those shops produced cheap footwear that was sold south to clothe enslaved people, and the Civil War, which ended that market, destroyed the town’s shoe industry with it. North Reading’s largest nineteenth century trade depended on slavery, and it did not survive slavery’s end.
Milk, Apples and Fruit
What replaced the shoe sheds was farming again, in a more commercial form. In the early twentieth century the principal products of the town were milk, apples and fruit, sold into the Boston market a dozen miles down the road. The orchards are the reason the historical society’s biggest annual event is still an Apple Festival, and they are part of the reason so much of the town’s open space is old farmland rather than old forest.
The House That Outlasted All of It
The Sergeant George Flint House was built about 1680, which makes it older than the town it stands in by more than a century and a half. It is still standing, and it is owned by the North Reading Historical and Antiquarian Society, which also keeps the town’s records and holds its Apple Festival on the Rev. Daniel Putnam House grounds on Bow Street. If you want to see what a household on that 1651 land grant actually looked like, the society is where to start.
Nineteen Sherman Road
The most consequential vote in recent memory was about a school. On March 22, 2013 North Reading held a special election and approved another $15.5 million for a school project it had already begun, 1,964 to 1,090. The finished project added roughly $876 a year to the average homeowner’s tax bill, and it produced the campus at 19 Sherman Road. Two things about that are worth carrying with you. The first is that a town of this size decided a $15.5 million question with about three thousand ballots. The second is that the procedure was the same one the town has used since 1853: the town votes the money, and the town lives in what it bought.
Sources: the Town of North Reading’s own history, as quoted and cited in the Wikipedia article on North Reading, Massachusetts, including the historical survey passage on the mills, the shoe sheds and the twentieth century farm products; the North Reading Historical and Antiquarian Society; and the Town Clerk’s own election records for the special election of March 22, 2013.