Royalston, Massachusetts
A Short History of Royalston
From a hill settlement on the New Hampshire line, to farms and small mills that carried the town through the 1800s, to the waterfalls that draw visitors today, Royalston has governed itself by Town Meeting the whole way.
A Town in the Worcester Hills
Royalston was settled in 1762 and incorporated as a town in 1765, in the northern hills of Worcester County near the New Hampshire border. It was named for Isaac Royall, a wealthy Medford landowner and businessman who was a proprietor in the land grant that became the town and who held enslaved people. From the start the town governed itself the way it still does, by open Town Meeting, with the whole electorate gathered in one room to vote the budget and the bylaws.
Farms, Mills, and a Century of Decline
Royalston’s population peaked at 1,546 in 1850, when hill farms and small mills along its brooks supported a full working town. As farming moved west and the mills wound down, the count fell for decades, bottoming out near 792 residents by 1910. The rebound took most of a century: the town has grown gradually since 1980 and counted 1,250 residents at the 2020 census, still a fraction of the people per square mile that most Massachusetts towns carry.
The Common and the Library
Royalston preserves a very well preserved classic New England town center and common, ringed by the town hall, the post office, the Congregational church, and the library. The Phinehas S. Newton Library was established in 1880, and in 1910 Phinehas Newton gave the funds for a library building. The library still serves the town from the common, and its trustees are elected on the town ballot, one more office an ordinary resident can simply run for.
Waterfall Country
Royalston is waterfall country. Royalston Falls drops through a gorge on Falls Brook, reached by a descending trail from Route 32, and Doane’s Falls steps down Lawrence Brook toward Tully Lake. Both are open to the public as reservations of The Trustees of Reservations, and Tully Lake, a flood control reservoir on the Millers River watershed, is managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In a town this small, protecting that land is town business, handled by elected and appointed boards a resident can join.
Sources: Town of Royalston (royalston-ma.gov); Wikipedia, Royalston, Massachusetts; U.S. Census Bureau.