Templeton, Massachusetts
A Short History of Templeton
From four villages settled in the 1750s, to a library built on one man’s fortune, to the night in 1906 when the town voted to own its own electricity, Templeton has run its own affairs by open meeting for more than two and a half centuries.
Four Villages, One Town
English families settled here in 1751, and the town was incorporated in 1762. Templeton grew up not as a single center but as four villages, and the names still stand: Templeton Center on its historic common, East Templeton, Baldwinville, and Otter River, named for the river that runs through it. The town takes the single word “Industry” as its motto, and the villages each grew around mills, farms, and workshops rather than a harbor. Templeton sits in northern Worcester County, bordered by Royalston, Winchendon, Gardner, Hubbardston, and Phillipston, the town it still shares a school district with today.
The Night the Town Bought the Lights
On March 10, 1906, at the Annual Town Meeting, the voters of Templeton did something most communities left to private companies: they decided to generate and sell their own electricity. Article 15 to build a municipal light plant passed 270 to 35, and the town appropriated up to fifteen thousand dollars, adding another sixty-five hundred that July. On January 25, 1907, the lines went live. More than a century later the Templeton Municipal Light and Water Plant, run out of Baldwinville, still powers the town’s homes and businesses. It is worth sitting with what that means: the people who set your family’s electric rates are answerable to a Town Meeting, in the same room that votes the budget.
A Library Named Boynton
In 1868 the town established the Boynton Public Library, named for the philanthropist John Boynton. A free public library was a serious civic statement in a nineteenth-century mill town, and the institution has anchored Templeton’s public life ever since.
The Common and Its Keepers
Templeton Center is built around a historic town common, listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Templeton Common Historic District and ringed by the meetinghouse and eighteenth and nineteenth century homes. On the common stands the Narragansett Historical Society, which since 1924 has kept the record of Templeton and the towns around it and runs a local history museum. If you want to see where the town came from, that is the block to walk.
Sources: Templeton Municipal Light and Water Plant, “Our Brief History”; the Narragansett Historical Society; the National Register of Historic Places (Templeton Common Historic District); U.S. Census Bureau; Wikipedia, “Templeton, Massachusetts.”