Rowe, Massachusetts
A Short History of Rowe
From a ten-thousand-acre grant named for the Greek word for ten thousand, to a mill town of 851 people, to a river valley that helped power New England.
Myrifield
On June 2, 1762 the General Court of Massachusetts auctioned off some of the province lands in the far west of the colony, and the Rev. Cornelius Jones bid ten thousand acres for 380 pounds. He named the parcel Myrifield, from the Greek myrias, meaning ten thousand. A settlement had already begun to take shape in these hills, guarded from the north by Fort Pelham, one of a line of forts the General Court had ordered built across the frontier in 1744. The Plantation of Myrifield was recognised in 1763.
1785, and the Name Rowe
By 1784 the community had grown enough to petition the General Court to become a town, and it asked to be called Exeter. When the charter was granted on February 2, 1785, the town was named Rowe instead, presumably after John Rowe, a well-known Boston merchant. That founding vote is worth sitting with: the town you live in exists because a room full of residents petitioned for it, in the same form of meeting that still votes your budget.
Mills, Sheep, and the Highest Years
Rowe’s population reached its peak of 851 in 1820, at the start of a heyday that ran to about 1860. Mills lined the brooks, sheep grazed the cleared hillsides, and a Satinet cloth factory ran in the village near what is now the highway garage. It was a hard place to travel: Rowe is a hilltown with a steep western edge dropping to the Deerfield River, and the lands west of the river were eventually given up because they were too far from the town center.
The Railroad, and the Davis Mine
In the late 1800s the railroad reached the valley, and Rowe became a place people came to spend the summer, with local families taking in boarders. Around the same time talc, soapstone, and sulfur ore were found in the eastern part of town, and mining took hold in the section called Davis. The Davis Mine worked pyrite from that ground for decades, and its site is still part of the town’s story.
A River That Made Power
The Deerfield River drew the electric companies early. They began buying land along the river in 1910 and ran transmission lines across the town the next year, and in 1926 the Sherman hydroelectric station was built at the river. Decades later the same river carried the Yankee Rowe nuclear plant, one of the first commercial reactors in the United States, which generated power for the region until it was shut down in 1992. For a town of a few hundred people, Rowe has sent a remarkable amount of power out into New England.
Pelham Lake, Kept Wild
The 1950s reshaped the town. Between 1956 and 1963 Percy Whiting Brown gave Rowe Pelham Lake and 448 acres of parkland, and the town adopted the first set of zoning bylaws in Franklin County. The gift became Pelham Lake Park, which the town has grown past 1,300 acres, including Adams Mountain, its high point at 2,140 feet. The Rowe Historical Society keeps the rest of this story in its museum on the town common, and published the fourth edition of The History of Rowe Massachusetts in 2006.
Sources: Town of Rowe, About the Town (rowe-ma.gov); the Rowe Historical Society; U.S. Census Bureau.