Sutton, Massachusetts
A Short History of Sutton
An eight-mile square of Nipmuc land granted by the colony’s own court, a town incorporated in 1716, two towns that broke away from it, and a government the town still runs by open Town Meeting three centuries later.
1704, and the Grant
Sutton did not begin as a town. It began as land. A Nipmuc man, John Wampas, had deeded land in this area to Edward Pratt after a trip to England in 1627, and the claims that followed were argued out in the Massachusetts General Court. In 1704 the court granted Pratt and a group of fellow proprietors an eight-mile-square section of ground, and that square is Sutton. The town was settled starting that same year and was formally incorporated in 1716. Three families were among the first to settle it, and one of them, Benjamin Marsh, is credited as a founder of the town and of the First Baptist Church of Sutton; he also served as a selectman and a moderator, the same offices Sutton fills today.
The Great Snow, and the Towns That Left
Sutton’s early years show up in its stories and in the map around it. In the winter of 1717 the Great Snow buried the settlers’ cabins so deep that, by one account, a local Indigenous person spotted chimney smoke through the snow and helped dig the Johnson family out. As the region filled in, pieces of it became towns of their own: Grafton was incorporated out of the area in 1735, and in 1813 the northern part of Sutton split off to become Millbury. What was left is the Sutton you know, a town in the Blackstone River valley whose ponds and brooks once turned mills and whose farms and orchards worked the land in between.
What the Town Made, and Keeps
Two Sutton landmarks carry the town’s history in plain sight. The Edward Putnam House, built in 1737 by a cousin of the Revolutionary officer Rufus Putnam, is one of the oldest homes in town and is the building on the town seal. And in 1984 Vaillancourt Folk Art, a nationally known maker of chalkware, was founded in Sutton and is still made here. In 2004 the town was designated a Preserve America community, a federal recognition of a place that has kept its historic character. The Sutton Historical Society keeps and shares much of this record, and takes volunteers who want to help.
A Government the Voters Still Run
Here is the piece of Sutton history that most directly affects you. Sutton is governed under a charter, most recently rewritten by the Legislature as Chapter 147 of the Acts of 2018, that puts a five-member Select Board and an appointed Town Manager in charge of running the town while leaving the lawmaking power where it has always been: with the voters, at an open Town Meeting. That is a real choice a town gets to make, and it is the kind of choice Town Meeting can reopen, because a charter can be amended the same way it was adopted. Knowing that the design is a decision, and not a given, is the first thing a Sutton resident can do with this page.
Sources: Wikipedia, Sutton, Massachusetts (settlement, incorporation, the 1704 grant, the Great Snow, Grafton and Millbury, the Edward Putnam House, Vaillancourt Folk Art, Preserve America); Chapter 147 of the Acts of 2018, the charter of the Town of Sutton (malegislature.gov); U.S. Census Bureau.