Swansea, Massachusetts
A Short History of Swansea
A town founded by people who had been pushed out of the next town over for what they believed, which then spent ten years sorting its own residents into ranks. What it did about that, in a single unanimous vote, is the most useful thing in this whole guide.
A Welsh Name on a Wampanoag Shore
This land was Wampanoag long before it was anything else, and parts of what became Swansea were carved out of the older town of Rehoboth. The name came from Wales. Some of the first English settlers had come from Swansea on the Welsh coast, and the earliest town records spell it as two words, Swan Sea. Their minister, John Myles, had founded the first Baptist church in Wales before he crossed the Atlantic around 1662.
1667: A Town Founded on Being Unwelcome Elsewhere
In 1667 the first Baptist church in Massachusetts moved from Rehoboth to Swansea, because Rehoboth had made it clear that Baptists were not welcome. In the same year Swansea was incorporated as an independent town. So the town begins with a group of people who were told their beliefs did not belong, and who responded by founding a place where they did.
Old Swansea was far larger than the town you live in now. Its 1667 bounds took in what are today Somerset, Barrington in Rhode Island, and most of Warren in Rhode Island. Barrington was set off in 1717, over religious differences again, and stayed in Massachusetts until 1747.
The Vote of 1681
Early Swansea did something that sounds strange now. It sorted its own residents into three ranks and handed out land accordingly: three acres to a man of the first rank, two to the second, one to the third. A committee decided who was which, and the committee could promote you or demote you. Most people were second rank. The system ran for ten years.
Then in 1681 the committee overreached. It granted five men the highest rank not just for themselves but for “their heirs and assigns forever,” which is to say it tried to make rank hereditary. The town’s own history, written in 1917, describes what happened next in a sentence worth reading slowly: “It was all these freemen could stand to have a landed aristocracy. But to have it made hereditary they would not endure, and so the town by unanimous vote repudiated the act of the committee, and from that time the practice went into disuse.”
A committee tried to create a permanent upper class in Swansea, and a meeting of ordinary residents voted it out of existence. Unanimously. In 1681. That meeting is the direct ancestor of the Town Meeting that still votes your school budget, and it is the reason this guide keeps telling you the room is open.
1675, and Rebuilding
King Philip’s War began here. The first attack came on June 20, 1675, and by June 25 the town had been burned. The war ended in 1676, and Swansea was rebuilt. The Commonwealth placed a marker at the site of the Myles Garrison in 1912, and the ground it stood on is still open.
Forges, Trolleys and Farms
After the war, small industry arrived: forges, ironworks and fisheries. Most of it eventually left, and a large agricultural sector stayed, which is why working farms still sit along Swansea’s main roads today. In the late 1890s trolley lines connected the town to Providence, Fall River and Taunton, and Swansea began to take on the suburban shape it has now.
1985: The Year This Town Went First
Mark Hoyle was a Swansea boy with hemophilia who contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion. In 1985, when almost nobody in the country knew what the disease was and a great many people were frightened of it, Superintendent of Schools Jack McCarthy decided that Mark would attend school with everyone else. It was the first time in the United States that a student known to have AIDS was allowed into a public school.
The decision drew national attention, arriving at the same moment as the Ryan White case in Indiana, and it helped open school doors to children with HIV across the country. Mark Hoyle died the following year. Swansea named an elementary school for him, and Mark G Hoyle Elementary is on the state’s register of schools today, which means the town’s decision is still written into the address of a building children walk into every morning.
Sources: Otis Olney Wright (ed.), History of Swansea, Massachusetts, 1667-1917, published by the Town of Swansea, 1917, full text at archive.org, which the town commissioned for the 250th anniversary of its incorporation; the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education school register (Mark G Hoyle Elementary, org code 02920017); Jay Hoyle, Mark: How a Boy’s Courage in Facing AIDS Inspired a Town And the Town’s Compassion Lit Up a Nation; the Massachusetts historical marker at the Myles Garrison site; and the Town of Swansea’s own website.