Rutland, Massachusetts
A Short History of Rutland
From Nipmuc planting grounds called Naquag, to a grant so large it seeded five other towns, to the exact geographic center of Massachusetts and the hill-town home of the man they called the Father of Ohio.
Naquag
Long before any English settler arrived, this high inland country belonged to the Nipmuc, the people of the fresh water, and they called the place Naquag. English colonists began settling here around 1666. This was not the coast and it was not the river valley; it was the upland in the middle of everything, and that position, dead center in the future Commonwealth, would come to define the town.
Incorporated 1713, and the Town That Seeded Five
Rutland was incorporated as a town in 1713, and its original grant was enormous. Over the next century the outer parts of it were set off one by one to become their own towns, so that Barre, Hubbardston, Oakham, Princeton and part of Paxton all trace their beginnings to old Rutland. The town you live in is the core that remained, and its boundaries are the record of those separations, each one voted through in the same kind of town meeting that still decides Rutland’s budget today.
The Center of the Commonwealth
Drive out Central Tree Road and you reach a maple, fenced and marked, that stands at the geographic center of Massachusetts. Measure the state in every direction and the balance point lands here. Rutland’s common sits about 1,200 feet above sea level, the highest of any town between the Berkshires and the Atlantic, which is why the wind comes hard across the hilltops and why the town was farming country long before it was anything else.
The Father of Ohio
Rutland’s most consequential resident was General Rufus Putnam, who served as George Washington’s chief engineer during the Revolution. He lived in Rutland, held town office here, and represented the town in the General Court. After the war he led a company of Revolutionary veterans west to found Marietta and open the Northwest Territory to settlement, work that earned him the name Father of Ohio. The Rufus Putnam House still stands in Rutland, and the town put it on its seal, so the building rides on every official document the town produces.
A Camp in the North Woods
During the Revolutionary War the northern part of Rutland held a camp for prisoners captured from the British forces, among them the hired Hessian soldiers who had fought for the crown. For a stretch of the war this quiet hill town in the middle of the state was one of the places the new nation kept the men it had taken in the field.
Sources: Rutland, Massachusetts (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutland,_Massachusetts); Geographical Center Tree of Massachusetts (roadsideamerica.com/tip/570); U.S. Census Bureau.