Ware, Massachusetts
A Short History of Ware
A grant its first owner named the Manour of Peace, a river name older than English settlement, the first employee buyout of a major manufacturer in America, and a northern border redrawn by a reservoir.
The Manour of Peace, and a Name From the River
The land that became Ware was first granted to John Read in 1716, and he named his district The Manour of Peace. The name that stuck instead came out of the water. Ware is believed to take its name from Nenameseck, the Native American word for the weirs, the fish traps worked at the base of the falls on the Ware River, and the town seal still depicts salmon fishing just below those falls. The place was settled from 1717 and incorporated as a town in 1775. Early settlement centered on Ware Center, out on what is now Route 9, and travelers along the Bay Path made a service economy of the town’s inns and taverns before industry ever arrived.
The Falls Put the Town Where It Is
By the early 1800s the center of gravity had moved from the farming village to the falls. The upper dam on the Ware River was built in 1824 to power a manufacturing complex, and the factory village that grew around it is where Main Street sits today. Three major manufacturers, the Otis, Stevens and Gilbert companies, made textiles, clothing and shoes here, and their demand for labor drew French, Irish and Polish immigrant families to the town. By the early twentieth century the Ware mills employed almost 6,000 people, more than half the town’s population today.
1938: The Town That Can’t Be Licked
The Great Depression nearly ended it. The Otis company, Ware’s largest employer for roughly a century, moved to liquidate, and the citizens of Ware answered by banding together and buying shares in the struggling companies themselves. The purchase, backed by the local Ware Trust Company, was the first employee buyout of a major manufacturer in America, and it created Ware Industries, preserving the livelihood of hundreds of families. Police Chief Bartholomew Buckley coined the phrase that became the town’s identity, The Town that can’t be licked, and Life Magazine put the comeback in its May 23, 1938 issue under the headline Life Goes to a Party: Ware, Mass. Celebrates Comeback.
The Same Year, a Border Drawn by Water
Nineteen thirty-eight redrew the map as well as the payroll. On April 28, 1938, the towns of Enfield, Prescott, Dana and Greenwich were disincorporated to create the Quabbin Reservoir, the drinking water supply for greater Boston, and Ware absorbed the southern portions of Enfield and Greenwich. Four whole Massachusetts towns went out of legal existence that day, and Ware’s northern border has run along the reservoir lands ever since. It is worth sitting with that as a civics fact: a town is a legal creation of the Commonwealth, and the Commonwealth can uncreate one.
2007: The Town Rewrote Its Own Government
Here is the piece of Ware history that most directly affects you. On April 9, 2007, Ware’s voters adopted a Home Rule Charter written by an elected nine-member Charter Commission of their own neighbors. It kept the open Town Meeting as the legislature and created the Town Manager form the town runs on today, with the Town Clerk becoming an appointed office. The voters have kept editing it since: amendments at the annual elections of 2011, 2012 and 2014 moved the budget calendar, reshaped the Conservation Commission, and created the Planning and Community Development Department. The trade was deliberate: fewer offices on the ballot, one professional administrator accountable to a board you do elect, and a charter the town can amend again the same way it was adopted.
The History the Town Keeps Itself
The Ware Historical Society keeps the town’s story, and the town’s own Historical Commission works on its historic places. The town also tells its history in its own voice: the About Ware pages carry the mill story, the buyout, and the Quabbin border change, and the 250th US Celebration Committee, a standing town committee, is planning Ware’s part in the nation’s 250th anniversary. History here is not a display case. It is a working part of how the town talks about itself.
Sources: Town of Ware, A Brief History (townofware.com); Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Cities and Towns at 250 (mass.gov, settled 1717, incorporated 1775); Town of Ware Home Rule Charter, adopted April 9, 2007, with the clerk’s certified amendment votes of 2011, 2012 and 2014; Life Magazine, May 23, 1938.