Rockland, Massachusetts
A Short History of Rockland
A town that voted on its own name, built shoes for an army, and took a borrowed coat of arms for its seal.
The Town Almost Called Commotion
In January 1874, the residents of East Abington met to decide what their new town would be called. The suggestions on the floor included Aberdeen, Highland, Albion, Glenwood, Rock, Benton, Alton, Underwood and Aalberg. Two people put forward Commotion. One voter wanted to keep the name East Abington. When the counting was done, 19 had voted for Andrew, 69 for Hatherly and 114 for Rockland. On January 21, 1874 they filed their petition with the state, the same day the residents of South Abington filed to form the town of Whitman. In March 1874 Rockland became a town. The name came from the ground itself, which is rocky, and a large rock still appears in the description of the town seal written into the Town By-Laws.
Hatherly’s Grant
The land underneath all of this was part of the Hatherly Grant, a nine square mile tract deeded in 1656 to the merchant adventurer Timothy Hatherly and others. Two thirds of present-day Rockland sat inside it, and the northern end of town still carries the Hatherly name. The first settlers arrived around 1673 and cut the virgin pine that covered the area, feeding it to the shipyards on the North River in Hanover. The Thaxter family came from Hingham in 1703 to build the first sawmill on Cushing’s Pond on East Water Street, and Stephen French put up a mill on Market Street about 1705. When the timber ran low, the settlers turned to herding and farming. In 1712 the General Court in Plymouth incorporated the town of Abington, and this corner of it became known as East Abington.
A Traveling Shoemaker
In 1793 a traveling shoemaker named Thomas Hunt arrived in East Abington with a handful of tools and opened a shop in the northern part of the village. That is the whole beginning. By 1832 there were six full factories in the village turning out twice as many shoes as neighboring Brockton. By 1865 East Abington shoe manufacturers were producing $3.5 million worth of shoes and boots a year, supplying most of the Union Army and employing 3,000 workers. For most of the nineteenth century, this was what Rockland did.
Why the Town Split
By 1874 East Abington and Old Abington were arguing over how tax dollars were being spent on local schools, and the eastern village decided to strike out on its own. That is a useful thing to know about a town meeting form of government: the disagreement that produced Rockland was a budget disagreement, settled by residents voting in a room, which is exactly how the town still settles its budget every May. In 1886 the new town adopted the Hatherly family coat of arms as its official seal.
A Carnegie Library and a Sesquicentennial
The Rockland Memorial Library at 20 Belmont Street was built between 1903 and 1905 with Carnegie money, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is still the town’s library, open five days a week, and its trustees are elected by Rockland voters rather than appointed. In 2024 the town marked 150 years since incorporation with a year of events, a parade, and a collaborative mural in which Rockland artists each painted a single puzzle piece about the town.
What Stayed the Same
Rockland has been an open town meeting community from the start, and it still is. The town adopted a home rule charter on March 8, 1969 at the Annual Town Election, effective January 1, 1970, and that charter kept Town Meeting as the legislative body while adding a professional Town Administrator to run the daily machinery. So the shape of the place is old: a room of voters decides the money, a board of five sets policy between meetings, and one hired administrator carries it out. The names on the seal changed once, in 1886. The room has not.
Sources: the Town of Rockland’s own Historic Commission pages, which quote Donald Cann and John Galluzzo’s introduction to ROCKLAND in the Images of America series; the town’s Town History and Data page, citing the Acts of 1874, Chapter 44; and the town’s Rockland 150th Celebration pages.