Worthington, Massachusetts
A Short History of Worthington
From a hill plantation bought in 1762, to the birthplace of the man who founded Temple University, to a town of about 1,200 that still governs itself in one room.
A Plantation in the Hills
Worthington began as Plantation No. 3, a tract of the western hills that Aaron Willard of Lunenburg bought on June 2, 1762, and the first families arrived that same year, a group from Preston, Connecticut. Six years later, on June 30, 1768, the Massachusetts Bay Colony incorporated the town, and the neighbors held their first annual Town Meeting on July 11, 1768. The town took the name of John Worthington, one of its five proprietors. That founding room, a meeting where any voter could speak, is the same institution the town still uses today.
The Man Behind the School
The town’s elementary school carries the name of its most famous son. Russell H. Conwell was born in South Worthington in 1843, became a Baptist minister, and founded Temple University in Philadelphia along with a hospital that grew into a major medical center. His lecture “Acres of Diamonds,” which urged listeners to find opportunity where they already stood, was delivered more than six thousand times. Conwell also founded and funded the Conwell Academy in his home village. When the town consolidated its schools in 1940, it named the new building the R. H. Conwell School, and it is still where Worthington votes.
Farms, Mills, and Maple
For most of its history Worthington earned its living from the land. Early enterprises included grist and saw mills, blacksmith shops, distilleries, and a linseed-oil works set up in 1791. Farmers organized the Worthington Agricultural Society in 1852 and held fairs, and over time maple sugaring and potato growing became the town’s signature crops. The open fields and working forests that shaped that economy still cover much of the town’s roughly 32 square miles.
Books for Everyone
Worthington gathered its first public library in 1884 from donated books, and in 1915 the town dedicated the Frederick Huntington Sargent Library to house the collection permanently. A town that would build a library from its neighbors’ own shelves is a town that expects to run its own affairs, and Worthington still does: the budget that funds the library, the school, and the roads is voted every spring by whoever walks into the meeting.
A Small Town, Still Deciding for Itself
Worthington counted 1,193 residents at the 2020 census, a small number that hides how much the town governs directly. There is no mayor and no appointed town manager. The three people the voters elect to the Selectboard run the town themselves, and the money is voted in the open, in a room where a sixteen-year-old who is registered to vote at eighteen can already sit and watch how a budget gets made.
Sources: Worthington Historical Society, History of the Town of Worthington; Temple University, Russell H. Conwell; Wikipedia, Worthington, Massachusetts; U.S. Census Bureau.