Tewksbury, Massachusetts
A Short History of Tewksbury
From Billerica farmland set off in 1734, to a state almshouse that shaped an American hero, to the commuter town along the Shawsheen River that Tewksbury is today.
Farmland Set Off From Billerica
Tewksbury began as farmland on the edge of Billerica. In 1734 the colonial legislature set the district off as its own town and named it for Tewkesbury, a town in England. For its first century and more, Tewksbury was a small farming community along the Shawsheen River, a scatter of family farms, mills, and meetinghouses far from the industrial cities rising nearby.
The Almshouse and Anne Sullivan
In 1854 the state opened one of its three great almshouses in Tewksbury, a refuge for the poor, the sick, and the orphaned that grew into what is now Tewksbury Hospital. The place had a grim reputation, chronically overcrowded and underfunded. It is also where a nearly blind Irish American orphan named Anne Sullivan was sent as a child, and where she spent four hard years before talking her way out and into the Perkins Institution. Sullivan went on to become the teacher who unlocked language for Helen Keller, one of the most famous partnerships in American history. A memorial on the town common honors them both.
Rails, Roads, and Growth
Like many towns north of Boston, Tewksbury changed with transportation. The railroad and then the state highways connected it to Lowell and to the wider region, and after World War II the farms began to give way to houses. Families moving out of the cities found room here, and the population climbed decade after decade as Route 38 and the interstates put Boston within commuting distance.
A Suburban Town
By the late twentieth century Tewksbury had become a settled suburb of about 30,000 people, with its own schools, shopping along Main Street, and a mix of older neighborhoods and newer subdivisions. It kept the town-meeting form of government even as it grew, so the people who live here still gather to vote the budget directly.
Tewksbury Today
Today Tewksbury is a middle-class town in the Merrimack Valley, proud of its schools, its youth sports, and its long stretch of the Shawsheen River. It still runs on open Town Meeting, an elected Select Board, and an appointed Town Manager, and it still tends the memorials on its common, including the one to the orphan who left the almshouse and changed how the world teaches.
Sources: Town of Tewksbury; Tewksbury Historical Society; Perkins School for the Blind; U.S. Census Bureau.