Winchendon, Massachusetts
A Short History of Winchendon
A township granted to war veterans in 1735, a town that asked to be named Epesberry and was told it was Winchendon, and a mill village that made so many toys the whole town is still called Toy Town.
1735: Ipswich Canada
Winchendon began as payment of a debt. In 1735 the Massachusetts House of Representatives granted the township then called Ipswich Canada to men who had served in the expeditions against Canada in 1690, and to their heirs, in compensation for their hardship. The name meant exactly what it said: a plantation for Ipswich men who had marched on Canada. The first permanent settlers did not arrive until 1752, and the town’s own seal still reads Plantation of Ipswich Canada Massachusetts 1735, with the rocking horse of a much later Winchendon riding above the date.
1764: The Name the Town Did Not Choose
In 1764 the residents petitioned the colony to incorporate as a town, and they asked for the name Epesberry. The petition came back approved, with a different name on it: Winchendon, after the English estate in which Governor Francis Bernard held an interest. The two hundred or so inhabitants took the name and set their government running, with the voice of the people ruling every detail of community life at town meeting, which is the same legislative body the town uses today. The early village sat at what is now called Old Center; within fifty years the town had moved itself down the hill to the Millers River, where falling water could turn a wheel.
Shingletown, Then Toy Town
Water power made Winchendon a town of wooden things. In the late 1700s it produced shingles in such quantities that neighboring towns called it Shingletown. Pails, tubs, clothespins and bobbins followed, then furniture, and then toys, so many toys that by the turn of the 20th century the town had a new nickname it never lost. Morton E. Converse, who had come from New Hampshire and gone into toys after buying a mill to make wooden products, built the works that made Toy Town famous. In 1912 the company built a twelve-foot rocking horse from nine pine trees, a giant copy of its own No. 12 model, and named it Clyde. Clyde rode in the 1914 parade for the town’s 150th anniversary, and a replica, Clyde II, still stands in town today. The textile mills of White’s Mill ran alongside the woodenware, and together they built the brick downtown a student walking Central Street sees now.
The Library a Neighbor Paid For
Winchendon’s public library began in 1867. In 1907 the library trustees went to Andrew Carnegie, the standard route to a library building in that era, and Carnegie offered $12,500. The trustees judged the town needed twice that, and when Carnegie declined to raise his offer, a local businessman named Charles L. Beals paid for the building himself. Beals Memorial Library opened at 50 Pleasant Street in 1913, and it is still the town’s library today. It is also still the town’s to keep: in May 2025 the question of whether its doors stayed open rode on a Proposition 2 1/2 override that passed at the ballot box by twelve votes, 896 to 884.
The Town the Mills Left
The town’s own history page says it plainly: during the later part of the 20th century, most of the manufacturing either moved south or out of the country. The villages the mills built, Waterville and Winchendon Springs among them, stayed on the map, and the town’s water still comes from the spring-fed Upper Naukeag Lake in Ashburnham. Winchendon adopted its current home rule charter at a Special Town Meeting on November 14, 2016, keeping the open town meeting it has had since 1764 and pairing it with a five-member Board of Selectmen and an appointed Town Manager.
The History the Town Keeps Itself
The Winchendon History and Cultural Center holds the town’s collection at the Murdock-Whitney House, which was bequeathed to the town’s historical society in 2000 by Adelaide Hazzard Whitney and opened as its museum the following year. The society renamed itself the Winchendon History and Cultural Center in 2015, and it runs the museum, the neighboring Isaac Morse House, and a calendar of public events. History in Winchendon is not only kept in a museum, though. The seal on every town document, the rocking horse on the common, and an elementary school named Toy Town all carry it into daily life.
Sources: Town of Winchendon, History (townofwinchendon.com/436/HISTORY); the town seal, as displayed on the town’s own Board of Selectmen page; Winchendon History and Cultural Center (winchendonhistory.org); Wikipedia, Winchendon, Massachusetts (history and library sections); Town of Winchendon official May 5, 2025 Annual Town Election results.