Wayland, Massachusetts
A Short History of Wayland
The oldest part of Sudbury, a town that had to give up its own name to become itself, and the town meeting whose library vote changed the law for the whole Commonwealth.
1638: The First Settlement
Wayland is where Sudbury started. About sixty men, women and children settled the east bank of the Sudbury River in 1638, among them fifteen Puritan families who had crossed on the ship Confidence, and they named the place Sudbury after the town in Suffolk where their pastor Edmund Brown had lived. It was only the third inland settlement in Massachusetts, after Concord and Dedham. The first meetinghouse went up east of the river in 1643, where the Old North Cemetery is now. The river meadows that drew them are still there, at the Cow Common conservation area and in the Great Meadows refuge lands, and Wayland and Sudbury residents founded the Sudbury Valley Trustees in 1953 partly to keep them that way. The town’s own history page notes that Wayland is today among the top five communities in Massachusetts for conservation acreage.
1654: We Shall Be Judged by Men of Our Own Choosing
Within ten years the settlement had a Town Meeting, and it was already using it. The early votes turned on the settlers’ wish to divide their own land without the clergy deciding it for them. In 1654 a group of ministers met at Parmenter’s tavern, called there by the pastor Edmund Brown to assert pastoral authority over the town, and they were met by a Selectman named John Rudduck, who told them: we shall, or should, be judged by men of our own choosing. That sentence is 371 years old and it is still the argument for showing up.
1775 and 1780: The War, Then the Split
By 1774 Sudbury was one of the largest towns west of Boston and had one of the largest militias, about 400 men. On April 19, 1775 its eastern and western parishes sent at least 302 men toward Concord. Of the 115 from the eastern parish, which is Wayland, 75 were militia under Captain Joseph Smith and 40 were the minute company under Nathaniel Cudworth. Fifty-six men who fought in the war are buried in the North Cemetery, and the Sudbury Minutemen recreate the march through Wayland every April 19.
Five years later the town split, and the reason was taxes. The east side of the river held more of the town’s assessed wealth and paid more than half the taxes while more than half the population, and the cost of serving it, sat on the west side. On April 10, 1780 the Legislature agreed to divide the town, with one condition that must have stung: under the law of the time the petitioning side gave up the name. So the older settlement, the original one, became East Sudbury.
1835: The Town Names Itself Again
On March 11, 1835 town meeting voted to stop being East Sudbury and to take the name Wayland, after Dr. Francis Wayland, then president of Brown University. Thirteen years later Francis Wayland gave the town a reason to be glad it had.
1848 and 1851: The Library, and the Law It Made
In 1847 Francis Wayland offered the town $500 toward a library if residents would match it. They did, in amounts as small as a dime, and at a town meeting in March 1848 Wayland accepted $1,000 and founded the library. Then the problem: no Massachusetts town was clearly authorised to raise and spend public money keeping a library open. Wayland’s own clergyman and state legislator, Rev. John Burt Wight, filed a bill in the General Court to say plainly that a town could. It passed both houses and was signed in May 1851, and it applied to every town in the Commonwealth. The Wayland Free Public Library, founded in 1848, is one of the first free public libraries in Massachusetts supported by a local tax levy, and it still stands at 5 Concord Road. The path from a town meeting vote to a state law ran through one resident who happened to also be the town’s representative.
2022: The Town Rewrote Its Own Government
Here is the piece of Wayland history that most directly affects you, and it is recent enough that your parents voted on it. Until 2022 Wayland ran under Chapter 320 of the Acts of 2004, with a Board of Selectmen and a Town Administrator, and it elected its own Town Clerk. Then the Legislature passed Chapter 33 of the Acts of 2022, and the Governor approved it on March 16, 2022. The act repealed the 2004 law outright, renamed the Board of Selectmen the Select Board, abolished the office of town administrator and replaced it with a Town Manager, and moved the Town Clerk off the ballot and into the manager’s appointments, confirmed by the Select Board.
The trade was deliberate: one fewer office on the ballot, and one professional administrator accountable to a board you do elect. Whether that was the right trade is a real question, and it is the kind of question Town Meeting can reopen, because a special act can be amended the same way it was adopted, by a warrant article and a vote.
The History the Town Keeps Itself
The Wayland Museum and Historical Society holds the town’s manuscripts and artifacts and runs the Wayland Museum, and the town’s Historical Commission and Historic District Commission work on its historic places. Much of that preservation is paid for through the town’s Community Preservation Act money, which the Community Preservation Committee recommends and Town Meeting votes one project at a time. The preservation of Wayland’s history is itself decided in the room where every registered voter can stand up.
Sources: Town of Wayland, Wayland History (wayland.ma.us/321); Wayland Free Public Library, About and The Beginnings of the WFPL (waylandlibrary.org); Chapter 33 of the Acts of 2022 (malegislature.gov); Wikipedia, Wayland Massachusetts, with its cited sources; U.S. Census Bureau.