West Bridgewater, Massachusetts
A Short History of West Bridgewater
From the West Parish of the original Bridgewater plantation, to a mill town on the Town River, to the town that still keeps the oldest parsonage in the country and, some say, the ground of the first industrial park in America.
The West Parish of Old Bridgewater
West Bridgewater is where Bridgewater began. English families first settled this ground in 1651 as part of the original Bridgewater plantation, and the land you live on was its West, or First, Parish, the core of what people came to call Olde Bridgewater. For more than a century the whole of the enormous Bridgewater grant, which later became four separate towns, did its public business out of this parish. That is why the town that governs itself here traces directly back to the first parish of the entire Bridgewater grant.
A Town of Its Own, 1822
On February 16, 1822, West Bridgewater was set off from Bridgewater and incorporated as a town in its own right. It was the second of three communities to break away from the old plantation within a few years: North Bridgewater, which grew into the city of Brockton, went first, and East Bridgewater followed. What was left kept the layout of the West Parish, and the town that governs itself by open Town Meeting today runs on the same form of self-government that the parish used long before there was a United States.
Mills on the Town River
The Town River runs through the middle of West Bridgewater, and for two centuries it was the town’s engine. Its falls turned grist mills and, in time, ironworks and shovel works, so West Bridgewater grew up with both farms and factories rather than one or the other. The town is often named as the site of the first industrial park in the United States, on the land that is now the Town Park, where several water-powered shops once stood together along the river.
The Oldest Parsonage in America
Built in 1662 for the parish minister, the Keith House still stands in West Bridgewater and is regarded as the oldest surviving parsonage in the United States. It is a plain reminder that this town was organised, and worshipping, and keeping records, generations before the Revolution, and that a great deal of American local history sits quietly inside the boundaries of one small Plymouth County town.
Sources: Wikipedia, West Bridgewater, Massachusetts; History of West Bridgewater (AccessGenealogy); U.S. Census Bureau.