Rochester, Massachusetts
A Short History of Rochester
From Wampanoag planting grounds called Seppecan, to a mill town with 57 waterwheels turning at once, to the inland heart of the Tri-Town it became after two of its own villages voted to sail off on their own.
Seppecan
Long before any English settler arrived, the land around present-day Buzzards Bay belonged to the Wampanoag, who called this stretch of it Seppecan. Its forests, rivers, ponds and fertile soil had supported Native communities here for generations. When you follow one of Rochester’s brooks toward the bay today, you are tracing the same water that organized life in this place long before the town had a name in English.
Incorporated in 1686
In 1679 a group of thirty proprietors bought this land from Plymouth Colony, part of what was called the Seppecan Grant, which stretched from the shores of Buzzards Bay toward Dartmouth, Middleborough and Agawam. Rochester was officially incorporated on June 4, 1686, one of the oldest towns in southeastern Massachusetts. It took its name from Rochester in England, the hometown of many early settlers, who were glad to find an abundance of oysters like the ones they had harvested there. From the start, the town governed itself the way it still does, in a meeting open to its residents.
A Town of Mills
What drew settlers to Rochester were the plentiful streams, brooks and ponds, where bog iron and herring could both be found. Those same waters powered the town’s early economy: at one point 57 mills were turning here, among them gristmills that ground grain, sawmills that cut the lumber for houses and ships, fulling mills that finished cloth, and forges that worked the local iron. Much of Rochester’s wooded landscape today is a reminder of the sawmills that once ran on its brooks.
Three Towns Out of One
Old Rochester was far larger than the town you live in now. Wareham was incorporated out of it in 1739, the first piece to leave. Then, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the town split again: Marion became a separate town in 1852, and Mattapoisett followed in 1857. Those divisions left Rochester without direct access to Buzzards Bay and turned a coastal community into the inland town that exists today. Each separation was decided the same way the budget still is, by residents voting in an open meeting, and the three towns remain tied together in the Old Rochester Regional schools.
Sea Captains, Then Cranberries
Through the first half of the nineteenth century Rochester prospered through agriculture, shipbuilding and the whaling trade that centered on Mattapoisett Harbor, then still part of the town. When the coast broke away, Rochester leaned into the land it kept. Working farms, cranberry bogs, forests and scenic country roads still define much of the community, and much of that open space is now protected by the volunteer Rochester Land Trust, which works only within the town’s own borders.
A Reading Town
In the nineteenth century the town founded the Rochester Academy, now the vestry of the Congregational Church. By the historian Mary Hall Leonard’s account, Rochester became known as a town that read good books and kept itself informed of the trends of the literary age, and it has hosted a library for more than 150 years. That civic habit still shows: the Rochester Women’s Club, organized in 1928, the Rochester Historical Society, whose museum sits in an 1887 former church on County Road, and the Land Trust all keep the town’s history and its landscape in residents’ hands.
Sources: Town of Rochester, Town History (townofrochestermass.com); Mary Hall Leonard, historian of Rochester; The Wanderer and Sippican Week; U.S. Census Bureau.