Westport, Massachusetts
A Short History of Westport
From a river the original deed called Coaksett, to the westernmost port in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to a petition a Westport sea captain sent the legislature seven years before there was a Westport to send it from.
Coaksett
The river came first, and so did its name. The original deed called this water and the land around it Coaksett, a name that survives today as Acoaxet, the village in the southwest corner of town along the west branch of the river. English settlement began here in 1670, when members of the Sisson family took up land that was then part of Dartmouth. For more than a century everything you now call Westport was simply the western end of somebody else’s town.
The Westernmost Port
The town’s name is a description, not a tribute. Westport was the westernmost port in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the harbor where the two branches of the river meet before emptying into Rhode Island Sound is the reason there is a town here at all. Look at the town seal on any set of Select Board minutes and you will see the argument made in pictures: a farm on one side, a ship and a bridge on the other.
1787
In 1787 Dartmouth was divided, and both Westport and New Bedford became towns of their own. The seal carries the date, reading INCORPORATED A.D. 1787. That is the year the people living out here stopped sending their business to somebody else’s town meeting and started holding their own, which is the same meeting that votes your budget today.
Paul Cuffe
The town’s own history page calls Paul Cuffe its most illustrious citizen, and it is not a close contest. Cuffe, who lived from 1759 to 1817, was a Quaker sea captain, shipbuilder and merchant of Wampanoag and African descent who built a fleet and a fortune out of this harbor, and who built a school in Westport that was open to all children.
He also did something a civics guide has to stop and point at. In 1780, seven years before Westport was a town, Cuffe and his brother John petitioned the Massachusetts legislature on a simple ground: they were being taxed and they could not vote. The document is titled a petition of several poor Negroes and mulattoes who are inhabitants of the town of Dartmouth, which is what this place was called then. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture holds it today. A resident of what is now Westport made the taxation and representation argument to his own state government, in writing, while the Revolution was still being fought over exactly that idea.
Five Villages
Westport is not one settlement but five, and residents still use the names. North Westport, once called Westport Factory, sits up by the Fall River line. Westport Point is where Main Road meets the river. Central Village holds the town offices. Head of Westport is at the head of the east branch. Acoaxet, also called Westport Harbor, lies between the west branch and Rhode Island, and the easiest way to drive there from the rest of town is through a corner of Rhode Island.
Farms, Turnips and the Right to Farm
Westport is a Right to Farm community, and it has the agricultural record to go with it. The Macomber turnip, which is a genuine local cultivar with a following, traces its ancestry to turnips sowed in Westport shortly after 1876. The town runs an Agricultural Commission and an Agricultural and Open Space Preservation Trust Fund Council, both of which appear on the same boards list as the Planning Board and the Zoning Board of Appeals.
What the Town Has Voted For Lately
History is not only old. Westport adopted the Community Preservation Act in 2002 and set up an Affordable Housing Trust in 2010, and those two decisions have been paying out ever since. In 2018 Community Preservation money helped protect 82 acres on Adamsville Road, the former St. Vincent de Paul camp, and turn it into Westport Woods Conservation Park, the first community park the town ever had: 61 acres of forest, almost three miles of trail and a set of natural play elements for children. In September 2021 Westport opened a $97 million Middle-High School at 400 Old County Road for grades five through twelve, with a MakerSpace boat shop inside it. Both of those started as an article on a Town Meeting warrant.
Sources: the Town of Westport’s own About page and Contacts Directory; the Westport Historical Society; the Westport Land Conservation Trust; the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture catalogue record for the 1780 Cuffe petition; Westport Shorelines; U.S. Census Bureau.