Plainville, Massachusetts
A Short History of Plainville
From a corner of Wrentham named for its flat land, to one of the youngest towns in Massachusetts, to a casino vote that paid for a whole new town center.
Before the Town
Long before any town lines were drawn, this land sat on the Ten Mile River in Wampanoag country. One of the earliest documented references to a settler here dates to 1674, when a Wampanoag man named Matchinamook received land at Fuller’s Dam on that river. For most of the next two centuries the plains that give the town its name were simply the western reaches of Wrentham, farmed and worked by families who did their public business at Wrentham’s town meeting.
Slackville, Then Plainville
The village that grew up here was first nicknamed Slackville, after Benjamin Slack, a large local landowner. When the community won its own post office in 1856, it chose a plainer and more lasting name, Plainville, for the flat open ground all around it. The name stuck long before the town did.
Set Off From Wrentham, 1905
Plainville became a town in its own right on April 4, 1905, when the Commonwealth incorporated it as a separate community carved out of Wrentham. It was one of the last towns Massachusetts ever created: only Millville in 1916 and East Brookfield in 1920 were incorporated later, which makes Plainville the third youngest town in the state. From that day forward the people of Plainville voted their own budget and elected their own officers at their own town meeting, the same form of direct democracy the town still uses.
The Question on the Ballot, 2013
In 2013 Plainville voters were handed a decision almost no town in Massachusetts ever gets: whether to host the state’s first legal gambling hall. They approved it by about three to one. Plainridge Park Casino opened on June 24, 2015 on Route 1, next to the Plainridge harness racing track, as the first slots parlor in the Commonwealth, run by Penn National Gaming. Under the state gaming law the town receives a share of the revenue every year, and Plainville decided early what to do with it.
A New Town Center, 2019
In 2019 the town opened a new municipal complex costing about 34 million dollars, funded largely by that casino revenue. Town Hall now stands at 190 South Street, and the police and fire departments share a public safety building next door at 194 South Street, on ground where a closed school had stood. It is the clearest thing a casino vote can produce: a set of buildings that residents own and can walk into, paid for by a question a room full of neighbors answered at the ballot box.
Sources: Wikipedia, Plainville, Massachusetts; Massachusetts Gaming Commission; WBUR (June 24, 2015); the Town of Plainville; the town seal. U.S. Census Bureau for population.