Northborough, Massachusetts
A Short History of Northborough
A town that has moved its own seat of government five times, and has been voting its own business in a room full of neighbors the whole way.
A Town Carved Twice
Northborough did not start as Northborough. The land was part of Marlborough first, then part of Westborough, and only in 1766 was it incorporated on its own. Even that was not the whole of it: the town became a full town, with the right of representation at the Great and General Court in Boston, in 1775. If you want a sense of how new that was, the Continental Congress declared independence the following summer.
The Meeting House Was the Town
In early Massachusetts the meeting house was not a church building that also held town business. It was the town. Northborough’s first one stood on land given by Capt. James Eager, about where the First Congregational Unitarian Church stands today on Church Street, and it held both town meetings and church services, at which attendance was required. The town’s own history is direct about how tightly the two were braided: the church tithing men were the legally elected officers of the town, and the minister had a strong hand in family life and in the schools. Schools, the town notes drily, had no formal setup until well after everything else in town was established.
Adjourned to the Tavern
Meeting houses in that era were unheated. Northborough’s town meetings were therefore often adjourned, in the middle of business, to the warmth of Monroe’s Tavern, a stop on the old Boston Post Road. The building did not stay where it was: in 1867 it was moved to the corner of Blake and Pierce streets, where it stands today. A student walking past it is walking past a room where the town’s budget was once argued out because the official room was too cold to sit in.
Five Addresses for One Town Hall
Northborough’s official offices, and the place the select board met, have moved five times. From the first church, to the second church vestry, to the Old Town House, to the building the town still calls the old Town Hall, and finally to the present Town Hall at 63 Main Street. That old Town Hall earned a listing from the National Park Service as a historical architectural monument, on the strength of having the longest roof span of any known building in the French Mansard style. The Town Hall that replaced it was not built as a town hall at all. It is the old Northborough High School, put up in the early 1930s, which means the room where the Select Board now meets on Monday nights was once a school.
A Library the Town Voted Into Existence
In 1868 Northborough voted a free public library into being, and it opened inside the newly built Town Hall. The collection outgrew that room quickly. In 1894 Cyrus Gale Jr. gave the town a building of its own, designed by the Worcester architect Amos P. Cutting, and that building still stands at 34 Main Street. Between 2007 and 2009 the town took down a 1975 addition, put a 21,000 square foot addition in its place, and restored the 1894 building; the library reopened in March 2009. The through line is worth naming: the library exists because a town meeting voted for it, and it is the size it is because another one did.
Mills on the Assabet, and What Came After
Scattered along the tributaries of the Assabet River are the remains of mills, and they mark where textile manufacturing and other early industry in Northborough boomed and then ebbed and died. What replaced them is a mix the town describes plainly: several working farms, a growing research and development industrial park, and above all a residential town for people who commute to Boston and Worcester. That last fact is the one that shows up in the town’s budget every spring, because a town of houses funds itself mostly out of the property tax on those houses.
Still the Same Room
The tools have changed. The 2026 Annual Town Meeting was streamed live on YouTube and carried on two cable channels, and it worked through 63 articles in the auditorium of a regional high school. The mechanism did not change. Northborough’s open town meeting government now runs under the town’s own home rule charter, and the town’s own description of who governs is two things: the five elected members of the select board, and the town meeting membership of registered voters. That second half is you, the moment you register.
Sources: the Town of Northborough’s own About Northborough page; the Northborough Free Library’s About the Library page; the Northborough Free Library entry in Wikipedia and the sources it cites; the 2026 Annual Town Meeting Warrant and Results, Office of the Town Clerk.