A Short History of Uxbridge

1662, 1727, and the Land Before Both

Uxbridge was first settled in 1662 and incorporated in 1727 out of the western part of Mendon, and it took its name from the Earl of Uxbridge. The town seal on its own letterhead carries the date: incorporated June 27, 1727. That is the pattern for most of Massachusetts, where a town is usually a piece of an older town that got big enough to want its own vote.

The land was not empty. Representatives of the Nipmuc people deeded it to seventeenth century colonists, and the century that followed cost the Nipmuc both the land and their self government. Many died in King Philip’s War. After the war, Nipmuc people were sold into slavery, interned on Deer Island where many died, or moved into the praying towns, which many Indigenous people today describe as a form of cultural erasure. Five bands of Nipmuc people live in the Worcester County region now. This is the first thing that happened here and it belongs at the front of the town’s history, not in a footnote.

The Abolitionists of the Friends Meetinghouse

Uxbridge was an early centre of the American antislavery movement, and it was organised out of a Quaker meetinghouse. Abby Kelley Foster and Effingham Capron were members there. Capron and his wife led a local antislavery society of 450 people, in a town whose whole population was a fraction of today’s. Brister Pierce, formerly enslaved in Uxbridge, signed an 1835 petition to Congress demanding the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia. The town was also a stop on the Underground Railroad, at the crossroads village where the Worcester to Providence stage route met the Blackstone Canal.

Wool, Power Looms, and Uxbridge Blue

Uxbridge sits at the midpoint of the Blackstone Valley, and the town’s own page calls it the centre of the Blackstone Valley Heritage Corridor, known for America’s earliest industrialization in textiles. Daniel Day built the first woolen mill here in 1809. Power looms arrived in 1820 and began a run of about 140 years making military uniforms and clothing. By 1855, 560 local workers were producing two and a half million yards of cloth a year. The cloth for the first United States Air Force dress uniform came from here, and the colour is still called Uxbridge Blue. When the mills closed the villages stayed, and the mill buildings are still on the ground: some restored, some rebuilt after fires, some waiting for a decision that has not been made yet.

A School for Ye Town of Uxbridge

In 1732, five years after incorporation, the town meeting voted to set up a school for ye town of Uxbridge. A grammar school came first, then thirteen one room district schoolhouses built for $2,000 in 1797, then Uxbridge Academy in 1818. Two hundred and ninety years later the same body still votes the school budget, in the same way, by a show of hands from whoever is registered and in the room.