A Short History of Spencer

The Road Through Town

Geography made Spencer busy early. By 1784 the town was a major stop on the Old Boston Post Road, the stage route between Boston and Hartford and on to New York. Passengers changed coaches here: one stage came west from Boston, another came north from Hartford, they met in Spencer, and each turned around and went back the way it came. Travelers stayed the night at Jenk’s Tavern. Colonial milestone markers still stand along the old route through town, which means the road you take to school is measured by stones set before the Revolution.

Fifty-six Men to Boston

When the war broke out in 1775, fifty-six Spencer men under Captain Ebenezer Mason set out for Boston, and many of them were at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Later, 313 Spencer men are known to have served in the Civil War, and thirty-two of them did not come home. Those are the numbers a town of a few thousand people put into two wars.

Shoes and Wire

Spencer’s first mill went up in 1740 on the Seven Mile River, the town’s best source of water power. In 1811 Josiah Green began making shoes, and by 1834 he had a factory. The Prouty family started making shoes in 1820 and built their own factory in 1855. In 1812 Elliot Prouty had begun drawing wire in a mill of his own, a business that stayed in the family until it merged with Wickwire Steel in 1916. At its peak Spencer had eleven factories and twenty-six buildings given over to wire drawing alone. The Howe family made the town famous in a different way: William Howe designed a wooden truss bridge that carried his name, his brother Tyler Howe patented a spring bed, and their nephew Elias Howe Jr. perfected the lockstitch sewing machine.

1888 and 1889

The town hall was built in 1839, and Denny Hall, Spencer’s first high school, eighteen years after that. Then in two years, 1888 and 1889, four prominent residents gave the town four things at once: David Prouty, Richard Sugden, Luther Hill and Nathaniel Myrick presented Spencer with a new high school, a library, a public park and the fairgrounds of the Spencer Agricultural Fair. Look at what those names are attached to now. The public high school in this district is David Prouty High School. The town library is the Richard Sugden Library. The Spencer Fair still runs on Labor Day weekend. A gift made before your great-grandparents were born is the building you take a test in.

The Abbey on the Hill

Since 1950 Spencer has been home to Saint Joseph’s Abbey, a cloistered community of Cistercian monks of the Strict Observance, known as Trappists. The abbey supports itself by its own work: the Holy Rood Guild, which makes liturgical vestments and linens, and Trappist Preserves, the jams sold in supermarkets across the country. For a decade the abbey also brewed Spencer Trappist Ale, the first and only certified Trappist beer made in the United States, until it closed the brewery in May 2022.

Two Hard Days

Not all of the town’s recent history is comfortable, and a civics guide that skipped it would be a worse guide. On the morning of April 25, 2007 a malfunction at one of Spencer’s water treatment facilities released a hazardous amount of sodium hydroxide, which is lye, into the town’s drinking water. The official cause was an operator error in the system that regulates the dose. Dozens of residents were treated for burning sensations and skin rashes. Sixteen years later, on June 2, 2023, lightning struck the First Congregational Church in the center of town and the building was destroyed by the fire that followed.

Both of those events are the reason certain lines exist in a town budget. Water treatment oversight, emergency management, mutual aid agreements with neighboring fire departments: these are not abstractions in Spencer, and they are voted at Town Meeting like everything else.