A Short History of Pembroke

The River That Built a Thousand Ships

For two centuries the North River was Pembroke’s industry. Five shipyards worked its banks: Brick Kiln Yard, Seabury Point, Job’s Landing, Turner’s Yard and Macy’s. Between 1678 and 1871, by the town’s own count, 1,025 vessels were launched from the shores of the North River. One of them was the Beaver, built at Brick Kiln Yard, which was one of the ships of the Boston Tea Party. The Bedford was the first ship to sail into a foreign port flying the American flag, and the Maria is the ship on the town seal. A word about the Columbia, which the town’s own history claims and which is worth getting right: she was the first American vessel to sail around the world, and Captain Robert Gray named the Columbia River after her in 1792. She was launched on this same river, but at Hobart’s Landing in Norwell rather than in Pembroke. The North River was a shared workshop, and not every ship off it is a Pembroke ship.

The water did other work too. An iron furnace was built here early on, and grist mills, flour mills and sawmills ran off the ponds and streams. Ice was cut from the ponds and stored in icehouses for the summer. Later the town made boxes, and by the early twentieth century Pembroke’s box factories were turning out shoe boxes for the shoe industry in Brockton and Abington and crates for the cranberry and poultry farms. The largest of them, the J. H. West Box Factory, employed more than a hundred workers, many of whom lived within walking distance of the mill.

December 28, 1772: The Town Meeting That Said It First

This is the piece of Pembroke history that deserves to be much better known, and the thing to notice is which body did it. Not a governor, not a congress, not a committee of famous men. A town meeting.

In November 1772 the Boston Committee of Correspondence asked the towns of Massachusetts to form committees of their own and state their grievances. Pembroke met on December 28, 1772, elected a Committee of Correspondence, and adopted ten articles written by John Turner, who was the town’s clerk at the time. The last of them predicted that if the measures the town complained of were persisted in and enforced by fleets and armies, they would in a little time issue in the total dissolution of the union between the mother country and the colonies. In plain words, this town meeting said out loud that the connection to Britain was going to end.

The historian George Bancroft singled Pembroke out for exactly that, writing that the first official utterance of revolution did not come from any congress of the colonies but from the people of a little interior town in Plymouth County. The better known Suffolk Resolves were approved on September 9, 1774, a year and eight months later. In 2018 the Legislature passed a resolution recognising December 28 as Pembroke Resolves Day.

Every one of those ten articles was voted in the same kind of room, under the same rules, as the budget your town votes now. That is the argument for showing up.

A Town That Has Been Legislating About Fish Since 1741

Here is the oldest continuous piece of Pembroke self-government, and it is about herring. The town’s ponds, streams and marshes are the home of river herring, and they were prized enough that in 1741 the town began regulating the taking and preservation of the fish. That is thirty-five years before the Declaration of Independence, and the town has never really stopped. Pembroke still has a Herring Fisheries Commission, which publishes its own stream maintenance plan and a migration route map and has used drone footage to inspect the run. The Pembroke Historical Society still holds an annual Grand Old Fashioned Fish Fry.

This is the useful thing to notice about a town meeting form of government. A decision made in a room in 1741 is the same kind of decision, made in the same kind of room, as the one that funds the fish ladders now. The warrant article changes. The room does not.

Cranberries, Trolleys and the Summer People

In the early 1900s cranberry growing spread across Pembroke and bogs were dug all over the town. A Massachusetts Historical Commission survey recorded that by 1924 the town directory listed seventeen cranberry growers, fourteen of them with Bryantville addresses, and fourteen poultry farmers alongside them. Rubber came too: the E. H. Clapp rubber works started on the Hanover side of the Indian Head River in 1871 and expanded onto the Pembroke side two years later.

Then the ponds themselves became the industry. In the late 1800s and early 1900s city families came out for the summer to escape the heat, the Brockton and Plymouth Railway Company ran a trolley line, and Mayflower Grove in Bryantville became a destination. Dense cottage colonies went up along the shorelines. Many of those cottages are year-round houses today, which is one reason Pembroke’s neighborhoods sit where they do. The ponds now do three jobs at once: recreation, municipal water supply, and irrigation for the cranberry bogs that are left.

From 1,492 People to a Suburb

Pembroke’s population was 1,492 in 1930. By 2000 it was 16,927. The steepest stretch came after the war: the town nearly doubled during the 1950s, from 2,579 to 4,919, and then more than doubled again over the following decade, reaching 11,193. A farming and manufacturing town became a residential one, housing people who work across greater Boston, and the school district, the water supply and the road network all had to be built to match. Almost every one of those decisions was voted at Town Meeting.

2018: The Town Changed Its Own Government

Here is the piece of Pembroke history that most directly affects you, and it happened recently enough that your parents voted on it. Pembroke ran for years on a Town Administrator, created by a town bylaw in 1998 under an older special act from 1991. In 2018 the town went to the Legislature for something stronger. The result was Chapter 334 of the Acts of 2018, an act establishing a town manager form of government in the town of Pembroke, enacted by both chambers on December 20 and approved by the Governor on December 28, 2018. It repealed the 1991 act outright and abolished the town administrator’s position the moment a town manager was appointed.

The trade is worth understanding, because it is the same trade towns all over Massachusetts have been making for a century. Pembroke handed a professional manager the power to hire and fire nearly every department head without asking anyone’s permission, and in exchange it kept that manager on a short leash held by five people you elect. The act also kept things back. The Town Clerk stayed on the ballot. The Library Trustees kept the power to appoint their own director. The fire department was written out of the manager’s reach. And the voters kept electing their own board of public works commissioners, who still set the water rates.

Whether that was the right trade is a real question, and it is the kind of question Town Meeting can reopen, because an act like this one can be amended the same way it was adopted.

The Library the Volunteers Kept Open

One more story, because it is the shortest possible lesson in what a Town Meeting vote can do. Lydia Drake was a Pembroke schoolteacher. When she died in 1937 she willed her house to the town to become a library. Nothing happened to the building until June 1944, when volunteers calling themselves the Lydia Drake Library Association took on refurbishing it themselves, and it was 1961 before the town appropriated even a small amount of money to repair the Pine Room, which had been her father’s cobbler shop. When Pembroke’s new public library opened in October 1998, circulation at the old one fell and the town scheduled a closing date for the following July. A group of volunteers pushed back and secured continued funding at the 2000 Annual Town Meeting. The doors reopened that September. The Lydia Drake Library is still volunteer-run today.