Tolland, Massachusetts
A Short History of Tolland
From a hill settlement carved out of Granville, to a small town that decided to string its own fiber-optic wire when no company would, Tolland has always run its own affairs in a single room.
A Town Carved Out of Granville
People first settled these hills in 1750, when the land was still part of neighboring Granville. Sixty years later the settlers on the western slope had grown numerous enough to want their own town, and in 1810 the Commonwealth incorporated Tolland as a separate community in Hampden County. It has stayed small and rural ever since: at the 2020 census the town counted 471 people spread across more than thirty square miles, roughly fifteen residents to the square mile, which is part of why the whole town can still fit its government into an open Town Meeting.
The Town That Strung Its Own Wire
For years the cable and phone companies looked at Tolland’s hills and decided the wire was not worth the cost, which left a whole town on the wrong side of the digital divide. So Tolland did what a Massachusetts town can do that a household cannot: it acted as its own utility. Tolland holds a Municipal Light Plant, the legal vehicle that lets a town own a utility outright, and in 2016 the voters at Town Meeting authorized borrowing $1,600,000 to build a town-owned fiber-optic network. The town still runs a standing Broadband Committee to oversee it. That decision is a working diagram of how Tolland makes choices: a proposal came to the floor, the voters in the room said yes, and the town owned the result.
Forest, Field, and Water
Much of Tolland is protected land. Tolland State Forest lies within the town, Granville State Forest reaches into it, and the southern end of Otis Reservoir sits in the north of town, so a large share of Tolland’s acreage is woods and water rather than house lots. The town still guards that land the way it decides everything else: in the spring of 2026 the Board of Selectmen signed permanent conservation restrictions on private property, held by the Massachusetts Audubon Society, that keep the land undeveloped while leaving it in private hands.
Sources: Town of Tolland (tolland-ma.gov), including the Board of Selectmen minutes and the town Broadband Committee; Wikipedia, Tolland, Massachusetts; U.S. Census Bureau.