Sharon History

Cannonballs for the Continental Army

Sharon’s Revolution was industrial as much as it was military. The town’s own record of itself puts it plainly: during the American Revolution the townspeople, mostly farmers and craftsmen, made cannonballs for the Continental Army. That is what an iron working town could give an army that had almost no manufacturing of its own. Two of the houses those people lived in are still standing, including the home of the patriot Job Swift.

Deborah Sampson Gannett, and a Bill the Legislature Paid

The other surviving patriot house belonged to Deborah Sampson Gannett, and her story is the reason there is a statue outside the Sharon Public Library. It stood at the old library on North Main Street for decades. When the town built the new library at 1 School Street, the Historical Commission and the Library Trustees spent a public meeting in October 2023 working out how to move a bronze statue without damaging it, and the move was made in May 2025. Even a statue gets a committee here.

She was born in Plympton in 1760, was sent away as a child when her family could not keep her, spent eight years as an indentured servant, and taught school. In 1782 she enlisted at Bellingham under the name Robert Shurtlieff and served seventeen months in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment. Her identity was discovered by a doctor treating her for a fever in 1783; he kept it to himself and arranged an honorable discharge that October, with a commendation for her conduct as a soldier. She was 23.

Then comes the part that belongs in a civics guide. She moved to a corner of Stoughton that was later annexed to Sharon, married a Sharon farmer named Benjamin Gannett in 1785, and raised four children in the family farmhouse. Money was short, and she had earned pay the army had never given her. So in 1792 she petitioned the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for her back pay. The legislature awarded her 34 pounds and commended her for heroism, and the document that records it bears the signature of John Hancock. In 1804 Paul Revere wrote a letter on her behalf to Congress, and she was placed on the federal roll of invalid pensioners. She died in her Sharon home on April 29, 1827 and is buried in Rock Ridge Cemetery. In 1983 the Commonwealth made her the official heroine of Massachusetts.

She could not vote for the legislature she petitioned. She petitioned it anyway, and it paid. The right to bring a claim to a government is older than the right to choose it, and it is still yours.

The Summer Town

From the 1800s until the 1940s Sharon was a resort. People came out from the cities to stay at inns and hotels around Lake Massapoag for the clean air and the water. That era left the town a physical inheritance it still uses: the Sharon Community Center is a former resort hotel, and the town bought it in 1967. Today it houses the Recreation Department and the Council on Aging and Adult Center, and a beach for swimming and fishing. A building put up to sell summers to strangers now runs the town’s karate classes and senior transport.

The Land the Town Kept

Sharon holds more than 5,000 acres of protected open space, which is a large share of a town of 23.4 square miles. Mass Audubon’s Moose Hill Wildlife Sanctuary, the oldest and largest sanctuary that organization has, covers 2,250 acres here. About 1,260 acres of Borderland State Park, roughly 60 percent of the park, lie inside Sharon’s borders. The town itself has preserved around 1,500 acres more as conservation land. None of that happened by accident: open space is bought, and in Massachusetts it is bought with votes at Town Meeting, which is why Sharon’s warrant still carries articles about land year after year. Article 17 of the 2026 Annual Town Meeting was the acquisition of 101 Old Post Road, and it passed.

The Charter That Was Not Adopted

Sharon’s government is old, and it is old on purpose. In 2010 voters were handed a proposed new charter that would have restructured the way the town governs itself, and they rejected it by roughly two to one. The open Town Meeting stayed. Sixteen years later, on May 4, 2026, that meeting worked through 22 articles in the High School auditorium, using a clicker voting system, with seating on the ground floor, then the balcony, then an overflow room in the cafeteria. Any registered voter could walk in.