History: A house in the wilderness
Which was, of course, also the church.
But the establishment of those two institutions (in one entity) was a sign that something important was happening in “North Worcester”: it was becoming its own town.
It was early in the 1720s when Worcester was incorporated and included the land that we now think of as Holden, land that was then broken up into large lots and sold to absentee landlords, mostly high ranking Englishmen, investors in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Some never visited the colony, such as Samuel Holden.
Holden was a member of Parliament and a director of the Bank of England. He lived in London and never left that
comfort to travel to the “wilderness.”
Others managed their investment in the wilderness of the west from Boston.
But in the early 1700s, “North Worcester” was, indeed, wilderness; there would have been nothing to visit — no roads through the area, no tavern or church, no farmers. Some settlers began to explore the area, and town history says the discovery by Jonas Rice in 1723 of limestone in the area that is now called the Chaffins section of town brought some attention to the resources of the area.
Those Boston landholders decided to lay out some roads. Settlers followed. They began asking for services and government. Worcester began to tax folks in the area in 1733, and in 1737, North Worcester built its own “meeting house.”
It was a rough place, unpainted, and, according to Holden historian Nicholas Zook (“Holden, the Evolution of a Town,” 1976), “for some time it lacked a pulpit, pews, and even a floor.”
But it was a sign of growing European settlement. Folks from the area didn’t have to travel quite as far for meetings or church — the appointment of a minister was an integral part of the new meeting house; church and state functions had not yet been separated — and the area acquired some independence on local issues.
In 1741, North and South Worcester officially separated. In 1743, 37 families were taxed in North Worcester; in 1760, nearly twice that many, 73 families, composed of more than 500 people. By the 1790s, that number of residents would top 1,000.
The tax money from those increasing families was needed for other things in the 1770s: the Revolutionary War took men and money. By 1787, the town’s meeting house was in disrepair, and residents of the town in this newly independent state and country voted to build a new one. By 1789, the building that is now a core part of the current First Congregational Church was built, on property donated by absentee landlord John Hancock.
That building served the town well, not just as a meeting place for government, but as church and government center. More population, more formalized government, more paperwork, more workers, all were part of the growing pains experienced by the church and government, and, by extension, of the building that housed them both.
That changed in the 1820s, when church and state finally split. The meeting house, built on town land became solely a church; a new Town Hall was built next door. Even today, only a few parking spaces separate the two. The land ownership issue wasn’t resolved, legally, until 1966, according to Zook.
But the town had its own center of government, the white columned building erected in 1836, the current Town Hall familiar to us all. This building reflected the growing population’s needs: a town of 2,000 or so needed central government, a place to keep (among other things) the deeds to property, the petitions to the state government, and the records of their births and deaths.
But it wasn’t just an office building; the meeting house image stuck with it, and the second floor of the town building was, of course, a hall, a meeting room where the whole town (at that time) could gather, if necessary.
Meetings were not just for governing purposes: in 1891, a carnival was held there; in 1919, a party was held to welcome home soldiers from the World War, with a temporary triumphal arch erected outside. Folks celebrated their anniversaries and birthdays there. And in January 2009, townsfolk decorated, cooked and invited all the town’s employees there to enjoy a big hearty “thank-you” for their service during the infamous Ice Storm of December 2008.
The town that was once the wilderness of North Worcester celebrated centennials and bicentennials there.
As population grew, so did the need for more town workers. In the 20th century, the town took possession of the building next door, now called the Starbard Building.
Holden’s population over the years
Statistics from the Holden Town Clerk’s office and from various histories of the town.