Townsend, Massachusetts
A Short History of Townsend
From a 1732 charter named for a British viscount, to the mills of Townsend Harbor, to the seventy-three men who marched to Concord on the first day of the Revolution.
Named for a Viscount
Townsend was incorporated as a town on June 29, 1732, and named after Viscount Charles Townshend, a British cabinet minister of the day. The name kept its original spelling for two generations. Around 1780, residents and the town clerks began dropping the “h,” and Townsend has been spelled that way ever since. The town sits in the northwest corner of Middlesex County, on the New Hampshire border, and its 300th Anniversary Committee is already at work on the milestone ahead.
The Mills of Townsend Harbor
The first mill in town was built in 1733 at the place still called Townsend Harbor, and the pond there came into being the next year, in 1734, when a dam was raised for the mill. The Conant House, the Grist Mill, and the Cooperage that grew up around that water are standing today, kept by the Townsend Historical Society, and they are open to visit. A town’s first mill is not a small thing: it is the reason people could settle, grind their grain, and stay.
The First Meeting House
The town’s first Meeting House was built about 1730 on top of Meeting House Hill. As Townsend grew, the building was outgrown, replaced, and eventually moved to the center of town, where it became the Methodist Church, and the old pews are preserved inside it to this day. The meeting house mattered because it was where the town met. Then, as now, the town’s decisions were made not by one official but by the townspeople gathered in one room.
Seventy-Three Men to Concord
When the British marched on Concord on April 19, 1775, the word reached Townsend that same afternoon. A cannon was fired on the common to sound the alarm, and seventy-three men from town marched south to join the fight. They were gone twenty-one days. The number is worth holding onto: seventy-three men out of a small farming town, turning out on a single afternoon. It tells you how directly the people here felt the stakes of the founding.
Schools, Stages, and Coopers
In 1744 the town meeting voted to raise and appropriate twenty pounds to support three schools, the beginning of public schooling in Townsend. The Boston and Keene stagecoach began running through West Townsend in 1806, first three times a week and soon daily, and passengers dined at the tavern at the corner of Main Street and West Meadow Road. For many years the town’s largest business was coopering, the making of barrels, run by the Fessenden family across three generations until it closed in 1960. The mills, the stage road, and the barrel works are gone, but the form of government that voted for those first three schools is the same one that runs Townsend today.
Sources: Town of Townsend, Brief History of Townsend; Ithamar B. Sawtelle, History of the Town of Townsend, 1676-1878; Richard N. Smith, Divinity and Dust: A History of Townsend, Massachusetts.