Seekonk, Massachusetts
A Short History of Seekonk
Wampanoag planting ground, then a farming town carved out of Rehoboth in 1812, then a town that lost two thirds of itself to another state and had to start again.
Before 1812
This land was Wampanoag long before it was anything else, and the people who lived here wintered inland and moved to the rivers and the shore in summer. Three Native villages stood in what is now Seekonk. In 1641 local Wampanoag granted a large part of this ground to purchasers from Hingham, and in 1653 the sachem Ossamequin and his son Wamsutta signed a deed for the land that became Seekonk and the towns around it. English settlement here was thin and inland, and that was the point: William Blackstone, Roger Williams and Samuel Newman all made a living on this side of the water partly to be out from under Puritan authority in Boston.
The name has never held one spelling. Seconch, Secquncke, Seaconke and others all appear in the record. The goose in flight on the town seal comes from it.
1812, and a Town of Its Own
Seekonk was settled in 1636 and incorporated as a town in 1812, taken out of the western part of old Rehoboth after decades of argument between Massachusetts and Rhode Island about where exactly the border ran. The Secretary of the Commonwealth still lists those two dates side by side. For most of the next two centuries this was farm country, with two industrial villages growing up alongside the fields, including the works that became the Rumford Chemical Works.
The Town That Shrank
Then in 1862 the boundary question was finally settled, and Seekonk lost. A United States Supreme Court decision moved roughly two thirds of the town into Rhode Island, where it became East Providence and part of Pawtucket. The transfer took about half of Seekonk’s territory, two thirds of its taxable valuation, and more than two thirds of its people, and the industrial villages went with them. What was left was farmland and a much smaller tax base. That is a real thing to sit with: the town you live in is the remainder, and it rebuilt from there.
Streetcar Suburb
The Providence and Taunton street railway opened in 1891, and it changed what Seekonk was for. A farming town two miles from a growing city became a place people could live in and commute out of, and the residential pattern that shapes the town today started then, along the roads the streetcar followed.
2009: The Town Taxes Itself on Purpose
In April 2009 Seekonk voters adopted the Community Preservation Act and put a 1.25 percent surcharge on their own property tax bills. The money can only be spent on four things: open space, historic preservation, community housing, and recreation. A committee drawn from the Planning Board, the Conservation Commission, the Historical Commission, Parks and Recreation and the Housing Authority recommends the projects, and Town Meeting votes them.
On May 8, 2023 that machinery did something you can go and look at. Town Meeting appropriated $150,000 from the Community Preservation Fund to hire a consultant and write a master plan for the farm at Elm Street and Lincoln Street, and in the same meeting created a seven-member Medeiros Farm Committee to oversee it, with one seat written into the vote for a member of the Medeiros family. A tax the voters chose in 2009 became a plan the voters ordered in 2023, and the family whose farm it was got a chair at the table.
Sources: Secretary of the Commonwealth, City and Town Incorporation and Settlement Dates; John Hutchins Cady, Rhode Island Boundaries 1636-1936 (Rhode Island Tercentenary Commission, 1936); the Town of Seekonk Community Preservation Committee and Medeiros Farm Committee pages at seekonk-ma.gov; U.S. Census Bureau.