A Short History of Rehoboth

Everybody’s Bill to Pay

The claim Rehoboth makes for itself on its own About page is a big one: that the town was the birthplace of public education in North America. What sits underneath it is a decision, not a building. At an early town meeting the settlers voted that the schoolmaster would be paid out of a portion taken from every settler, and not only from the households that happened to have children to teach. Dedham and Boston make competing claims and the argument has never been settled. The idea is the same in each version, and you inherited it: a town can decide, together and out loud, that a school is everybody’s bill.

The Beacon on Brook Street

Uphill from where Brook and Chestnut Streets meet there is a hilltop the town calls Liberty Tree Park. During the Revolution most of Rehoboth was cleared farmland, and from that hill a sentinel could see Bristol, Rhode Island and Narragansett Bay. Wood fires were most likely lit there and at Great Meadow Hill in north Rehoboth as a signal chain running north out of Rhode Island. Below the Horton Signal on Brook Street stood a great oak the town called the Liberty Tree, where the militia gathered before marching. The original tree is long gone. The sapling growing in its place may be a descendant, and the Historical Commission looks after the park.

The Meeting House That Was Also the Church

In March 1773 the town voted to pull down its old meeting house on Lake Street and build a new one, with a burial ground beside it, on ground that is now inside the Rehoboth Village Cemetery. It had no bell and no steeple, and it served as both church and town meeting house, which is to say the room where the town argued and the room where it worshipped were the same room. The right to occupy certain pews was sold at public auction. The town’s own historic guide records that the gallery’s high corner seats were where Black residents sat, men in one corner and women in the other. The building came down in 1840, after the Congregational Church was built in the village.

Fifteen Districts, Then Three

The one room Hornbine School stands at Hornbine Road and Baker Street. It was built in 1845 and 1846 and taught children through grade 9. It was enlarged in the 1920s and it closed in 1937, when Rehoboth cut its number of school districts from fifteen to three. The building was auctioned off, served a variety of uses, and finally fell empty. The Hornbine School Association bought it back and restored it for the town’s 325th anniversary in 1968. Because the original desks had been broken up for their metal during the Second World War, replacements were gathered from other places, though the teacher’s desk is from a Rehoboth school. Rehoboth third graders still visit it.

Mills, and the Year the Dam Went

In 1810 a group of Rehoboth citizens set up the Palmer’s River Manufacturing Company on Reed Street, on the site of Joshua Smith’s old grist and saw mill. It made cotton yarn for nearby families to weave by hand, and it was one of the earliest factories in this part of Massachusetts, predating the great Fall River mills. Enlarged in 1826, it became the Orleans Manufacturing Company. Rehoboth Village grew up around its own mills on what is now Route 118, Town Meetings were held in what is today the American Legion hall, the Congregational Church was built in 1838, and in 1901 the Providence and Taunton Street Railway ran a line through the village.

Then, in June 1859, after prolonged rain, the dam at Bad Luck Pond gave way. The flood carried off eleven bridges, a smaller dam and part of the Village Mill. Repairing the bridges cost the town $424.36, and no lives were lost. The dam standing there now was built in the early twentieth century by the Bristol County Water Authority in Rhode Island, to supply drinking water across the state line.