Worcester County, Massachusetts - Chapter 101, 1889

In colony and provincial records and early deeds recorded at Cambridge and Worcester one meets frequent reference to a tract of land, larger than any -existing town of this Commonwealth, as " lying between Marlborough, Worcester and Lancaster,'' or " joyning ye west side of Marlborough town bounds," or "lying east pointe to Quonsigamon Ponds," or as " Quonsiccamon Farms," or a " meete place for a plantation near Quansiggamog," the Indian name in our times uniformly written Quinsigamond, one to two hundred years ago, being differently spelt almost every time it was written, and being applied to the vicinity of Long Pond as well as to the pond itself - much oftener, too, as it were quite easy to show, to the east side, notwithstanding the complacent appropriation of it by our neighbors of Worcester, than to the west aide of the pond. The question why formation of this large tract of land into a town was delayed till after all the other territory in the vicinity was formed into towns has been often asked, but the answer is not far to seek, and in truth has been already given. The choicest portions of it had been already granted, and in the language of the report of a viewing committee sent out to find a meet place for a plantation at Quinsigamond, it had been " spoiled by the granting (if farms."

After the death of the original grantees of the Haynes' Farm, several of their heirs sold their rights or shares therein, and in 1716 the owners of it, twentythree in number, living mostly in Marlborough, but some of them in Sudbury and other towns, with a view to division and settlement of their three thousand two hundred acres at Quinsigamond, caused it to be surveyed and divided uj). Their surveyor was John Brigham, of Marlborough, who was the grantee of a large " farm " in the West Parish of that town, and was at that very time pushing a scheme for setting off that parish as a new town, to be called Westborough, and the owners of the Haynes' Farm employed Mr. Brigham to draw up and present to the General Court a petition for the grant of the whole of the large tract between Marlborough and Worcester as a township. This petition, which was signed by John Brigham himself and thirty others, is said to have been lost, and it is not known who all of the petitioners were nor exactly what they asked for, but it was referred, together with another petition of which also John Brigham was the first signer, for incorporation of his new town of Westborough, to the same viewing committee, who reported favorably on both petitions. But it is easy to see that Mr. Brigham and his committee, of which John Chandler, of Woodstock, was chairman, and to which the reference of both these petitions was of course no accident, were looking mainly to the interest of the new town and less to those of the new township. A good slice from the latter - to wit, a strip between the former boundary of Marlborough and Haynes' Farm - was added to the former by the committee, who thought that the petitioners for the township were competent members and likely to make a speedy settlement, and that the slice proposed to be taken would not so disadvantage the township but that it might make a good town - that is to say, if the owners of all the five farms at Quinsigamond would make common cause with the petitioners, there would be plenty of land left after parting with the slice in question.

November 2, 1717, the General Court accepted the committee's report and " ordered that the tract of land protracted and described, together with the farms heretofore granted to particular persons contained in the plot, be made a township, excepting" the slice referred to, and appointed a committee to lay out the whole of said lands (except the lands before granted) to persons most likely to advance settlement of the place, who were to pay not exceeding twelve pence per acre to the use of the Province and the committee's charge for laying out.

The committee, of which Jonathan Remington was chairman, laid out forty-five lots of about seventy acres each, with a fifty-acre right to each, by which I understand a right in the settler to have fifty acres more in the undivided lands, and also laid out for each lot about six acres of valuable meadow often quite remote from the lot. The " valuable meadow " was swamp land, and is at the present day less highly valued than it once was. And the proprietors, March 28, 1722, granted " the committy to settle the town" fifteen hundred acres for laying out the lots. The Committee's Farm, so-called, was a parcel of good land in the northwest corner of the township, called the Leg, on the Stillwater River, now a part of Sterling. Many persons have been misleil by Ward's "History of Shrewsbury " into sujiposing that it was upon the lots laid out by the Remington committee that all the first-comers to Shrewsbury settled, and such appears to have been the belief of Mr. Ward himself. The number of the proprietors in 1718, as appears from the apportionnientof a tax, was forty-five, and a lot was laid out for each one, and a few of the men to whom lots were assigned no doubt settled upon them personally. But it was upon the Haynes' Farm, which covered all the land on both sides of the Great road, extending southerly beyond where the Worcester turnpike was afterwards laid, that most of the new-comers from Marlborough settled. The lots numbered one to sixteen, were laid out on a strip of land extending along the south and east boundary lines of the town - that is between Haynes' Farm and the town of Grafton on the south, and the towns of Westborough and Northborough on the east - and if one will carefully examine the description of these lots, as taken by Mr. Ward from the proprietors' book, he will find frequent recurrence to the " town lines" and "Haines' Old Farm" as boundaries. Lots Nos. 17, 18 and 19 lay east of Rawson's Farm, whose locality has been before given, and Nos. 21, 22 (which was the minister's lot) and 23 lay between Haynes' Farm and Rawson's Farm, and the description of all these lots refer to these so-called "farms" as boundaries. The other lots are more diflBcult to locate with exactness. Most of them were in that part of Shrewsbury now Boylston and West Boylston. No. 24 is " bounded westerly by Judge Sewall's Farm ;" No. 20 " lyeth near the west bounds of Haines' Old Farm ;" No. 30 " Lyeth near the North End of Davenport's Farm;" Nos. 31, 32 and 34 are bounded by the " pretended Maiden Farm," etc., etc. Mr. Ward has copied these descriptions containing these references to the farms without inquiry as to what or where they were.

Shrewsbury was incorporated - not by a formal act, but by an order upon application of the inhabitants for incorporation dated December 19, 1727. Mr. Ward thinks it was so called from the English town of that name, whence may have come the ancestors of some of the proprietors. Before Saxon scholars gave the true etymology of the name it was said to mean the borough of shrews, which may be either a kind of moles or a kind of wives. The Saxons, who took the English town in the fifth century, derisively changed its Welsh name to Scrobbes-Byrig (scrub town), of which the name Shrewsbury is a euphonious corruption. But there is neither evidence nor reason for supposing any of the proprietors' ancestors came from the English Shrewsbury. Like many other towns, probably Shrewsbury took its name from a prominent man of the time when it was in want of one. Our neighbor on the south is well known to have been named from the Duke of Grafton, damned to everlasting fame in the letters of Junius. Charles Talbot, titular Earl of Shrewsbury by birth, was one of the Seven who signed the declaration inviting over the Prince of Orange on the abdication of James II., and became Secretary of State to King William, with title of Duke of Shrewsbury. On account of his winning manners Talbot is said to have been named by William of Orange King of Hearts, and habitually called by this pleasant title by the whole royal court. Under Queen Anne he held the offices of First Lord Chamberlain and Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and finally with her dying breath the Queen gave him the staff of Lord High Treasurer, that a sure hand might hold the helm of state at her death and safely transmit the Protestant succession. As soon as the Queen had drawn her last breath Charles Talbot, Duke of Shrewsbury, August 14, 1714, proclaimed George Lewis, Elector of Hanover, King of England and Ireland. The Duke died 1718, between which time and Queen Anne's death our town was settling, and as a child born in some historical crisis is named from a prominent actor in it, so the town of Shrewsbury took its name from the statesman who, notwithstanding public apprehension of the Pretender, had safely transmitted the English crown in the Protestant line. But if the same partiality for Indian names had existed in early times as now, probably Shrewsbury and Grafton would have continued to be called Quinsigamoud and Hassanimisco to this day.