Walpole, Massachusetts
A Short History of Walpole
From a sawmill settlement on the edge of a cedar swamp, to a paper-mill town on the Neponset, to the town that voted to tax itself to buy a farm.
Carved Out of Dedham
Walpole began with sawmills. English settlers were working the land here from 1659, building along the great Cedar Swamp, and by the early 1720s the mill families were tired of traveling to Dedham, the sprawling mother town, for church and town business. So they petitioned to become a separate town with their own minister, and in 1724 the General Court agreed. The new town took its name from Sir Robert Walpole, then Britain’s prime minister. A town that exists because a group of neighbors petitioned the government for the right to run their own affairs has self-government in its founding papers, and it still runs on that idea.
Revolution
When the alarm went out from Lexington and Concord in April 1775, Walpole sent 157 men under Captain Seth Bullard. In December 1777 the town raised 65 minutemen again to help defend Newport Harbor for three weeks. For a farming and mill town of its size, those are large numbers, and they say something about how completely the Revolution ran through ordinary Massachusetts towns.
Mills on the Neponset
The water that powered the first sawmill kept powering Walpole for two centuries. By 1860 the town’s mills were turning out cotton, lumber, and paper, and East Walpole grew up around the Bird & Son paper works on the Neponset River, a complex that operated until 1980. The Bird family’s mark is still on the town: Walpole’s first public library was founded in 1872, and Francis William Bird Park, 89 landscaped acres in East Walpole given in the family’s memory in 1925, is owned and cared for by The Trustees of Reservations to this day.
The Charter and the 150
As Walpole grew past the size where every voter could fit in one hall, the town rebuilt its own government. The Home Rule Charter adopted at the Annual Town Meeting on January 15, 1973 created the modern structure: a representative Town Meeting of 150 elected members, apportioned among the precincts by population, with a five-member Select Board holding the executive power and a professional Town Administrator running the operation. The charter has been amended since, but the design has held for half a century. Any registered voter can still stand for a precinct seat with 25 signatures.
The Farm the Town Bought
In 1997 Walpole’s voters approved an override, a vote to raise their own taxes, to buy roughly 365 acres of farmland that became Adams Farm. The town owns it outright: fields, woods, and about ten miles of trails, stewarded by a volunteer committee and a friends group. It is the rare town vote you can walk through, and it is the reason this guide opens with it: the machinery described on these pages is the same machinery that bought that land.
Sources: Town of Walpole; eCode360, Town of Walpole Charter; Wikipedia (Walpole, Massachusetts; Francis William Bird Park); Friends of Adams Farm.