Whitman, Massachusetts
A Short History of Whitman
From a corner of Bridgewater called Little Comfort, to a tack factory that was the largest in the world, to a kitchen on Bedford Street where somebody invented the chocolate chip cookie.
Little Comfort
Whitman started as a piece of somewhere else. The land was part of Bridgewater and the settlement on it was called Little Comfort. In 1712 the area became part of the town of Abington, and it stayed a corner of Abington for more than a century and a half. In 1875 the state legislature made it a township of its own, under the name South Abington. Eleven years later, at a town meeting on May 3, 1886, the residents took a vote and changed the name to Whitman. That is the whole origin story of this town’s name: not a royal charter, not a founder’s whim, but a show of hands in a hall.
Timber, Tacks and Shoes
Whitman was farmland first, and then it was a factory town. The first industry grew up on the downstream side of the river that crosses the east side of town, and in 1745 the colony’s first industrial canal and tunnel were built there. Trees from Whitman’s forests went out to the seaport towns, and timbers cut here went into the frigate USS Constitution, the ship you can still visit in Boston Harbor. Colonel Hobart’s foundry cast cannon balls. Local shops made the first shoe racks, then nails, tacks and wooden boxes.
By the middle of the nineteenth century some of those shops had become full assembly line factories. The Dunbar, Hobart and Whidden tack factory, put up in 1864, was at one point the largest in the world. The D.B. Gurney Company dates to 1825 and is still operating in Whitman today, which makes it older than the town it sits in. But the products that defined the place were shoes and boots, and the shoe industry was Whitman’s largest employer until the middle of the twentieth century, when it began a long decline.
Turning On the Water
When Whitman was incorporated there was no public water system at all. Every household and every factory drew from its own well. The town won the franchise to draw water from Silver Lake but could not raise the money to build the system, so it handed the franchise to the city of Brockton on the condition that Whitman could buy its share at a special rate. Silver Lake water reached Whitman taps on January 2, 1905. It is a useful thing to know about municipal government: a town that cannot afford to do something alone can still write the terms under which somebody else does it.
The Toll House
The building went up in 1817 as a stop on the road. In 1930 Kenneth and Ruth Wakefield bought the old Smith house and turned it into a restaurant, the Toll House. What happened next is the reason people who have never been to Massachusetts know the name of this town: Ruth Wakefield’s cookie, made with broken pieces of chocolate that did not melt away as she expected, became so popular that she took it to the Nestle company. The chocolate chip cookie was invented in Whitman. The restaurant burned on New Year’s Eve in 1984 and was not rebuilt, and a historical marker now stands on the site.
The Last Dairy
Dairy farming ran alongside the factories for generations, with several family operated farms selling milk to local markets. Most of that farmland has been built on. Peaceful Meadows is the one full dairy operation still in business in Whitman, which makes a stop there a piece of local history as much as a summer errand.
Sources: Town of Whitman, Town History (whitman-ma.gov/171/town-history), which is the source for every fact above except the Toll House fire date and the invention of the chocolate chip cookie by Ruth Graves Wakefield, which come from the Wikipedia article on Whitman, Massachusetts and the sources cited there; U.S. Census Bureau.