Warwick, Massachusetts
A Short History of Warwick
From a 1739 hill settlement first known as Gardner’s Canada, to a library that grew out of a townspeople’s collection, to a town that voted to build its own internet when no company would wire the hills.
A Town on the New Hampshire Line
Warwick was one of four tracts Massachusetts laid out in 1735, first called Gardner’s Canada, first settled in 1739, and officially incorporated as a town in 1763. It sits in the hill country of north central Massachusetts, right up against the New Hampshire line, spread across about 37 square miles of forest and open field. In the early 1800s, when Franklin County was carved out of the older and larger Hampshire County, Warwick’s corner became part of Franklin County, where it has sat ever since. Through all of it the town has governed itself the same way: by open town meeting, where the voters in the room make the decisions.
Mount Grace and the Protected Hills
Rising over the town is Mount Grace, whose summit reaches 1,617 feet with a fire tower that looks north across the line to Mount Monadnock. The state owns the mountain as part of the Mount Grace State Forest, and the Metacomet-Monadnock Trail runs right over the top. Add the Warwick State Forest and the town’s own conservation land, and roughly a third of Warwick is permanently protected and open to the public, threaded with trails and ponds like Moores Pond, Sheomet Lake, and Laurel Lake. In a town this small, that much protected land is not an accident; it is the sum of many town meeting votes.
A Library the Town Kept for Itself
Warwick’s library began as a circulating library organized by residents in 1815, kept up privately for decades. In the fall of 1870 the town appropriated $100 toward a free public library, and in 1871 it took the collection over and opened it to every family in town. The Warwick Free Public Library still serves the town from Hotel Road, and its trustees are still elected on the town ballot, which is a working diagram of how this town makes decisions: a town meeting votes, and an institution exists.
The Town That Built Its Own Internet
When commercial cable companies decided the hills of Warwick were not worth the wire, the town did the work itself. At Town Meeting in 2008 the voters put up about $40,000, the town bought the equipment and trained its own installers, and the first customers came online in 2009. Warwick still owns and runs that broadband network, and the same voters who approved it set its budget at Town Meeting every year, which makes Warwick one of a handful of Massachusetts towns that treats internet access as a public utility it decides for itself.
Sources: Town of Warwick (warwickma.org); Wikipedia, Warwick, Massachusetts; U.S. Census Bureau.