Uxbridge, Massachusetts

• 1. Introduction

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  Uxbridge, Massachusetts sits at the midpoint of the Blackstone Valley, 36 miles southwest of Boston, and it has been quietly collecting firsts for nearly four centuries. The first colonial woman to vote in America cast her ballot here. The first private hospital for mental illness in the country opened here. IBM's first chief engineer ran his first laboratory here. A soldier named Deborah Sampson enlisted under the name Robert Shurtlieff of Uxbridge and fought in the American Revolution. The town calls itself the Heart of the Blackstone Valley, but it has also been called the Cradle of the Industrial Revolution. How did a small New England town of roughly fourteen thousand people accumulate that kind of history? The answer begins with land sold for twenty-four pounds sterling, runs through power looms and cashmere wool and Civil War uniforms, and arrives at a high school girls' field hockey team winning its fifth straight state title in 2025.

• 2. Nipmuc Land and Colonial Settlement

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  In September 1663, a man named Great John of Natick sold a tract called Squimshepauk plantation to settlers, recording the price as twenty-four pounds sterling. That transaction was part of a broader pattern in which representatives of the indigenous Nipmuc people deeded land to seventeenth-century colonists. John Eliot had earlier established what he called Praying Indian Villages among the Nipmuc, settlements that many indigenous people now regard as a form of cultural genocide. Two of those villages carried the names Waentug and Wacentug, meaning river bend and rich fishing waters, and another was called Rice City, which would later be settled as Mendon.

  Mendon itself began in 1667, burned during King Philip's War, and was resettled in 1680 by Colonel Crown and others. King Philip's War, which began near Bristol, drew Nipmuc into a native uprising that ended with devastating consequences. Many indigenous survivors were sold into slavery. Others were interned on Deer Island, where roughly half died. Western Mendon was carved off and incorporated as Uxbridge in 1727, with Farnum House hosting the first town meeting. Today five bands of the original Nipmuc people still live in the Worcester County region.

• 3. Revolution and Abolition

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  Seth Read fought at Bunker Hill, and Washington stopped at Reed's tavern on his way to take command of the Continental Army. Washington passed through Uxbridge again on his post-inaugural tour, sleeping at the Samuel Taft House along the Middle Post Road. Samuel Spring was among the first chaplains of the American Revolution. Simeon Wheelock died protecting the Springfield Armory. Shays' Rebellion also began here, and Governor John Hancock personally moved to quell riots in Uxbridge. Seth Reed later became instrumental in placing the phrase "E pluribus unum" on United States coins.

  The most striking of Uxbridge's Revolutionary figures may be Deborah Sampson, who enlisted under the alias Robert Shurtlieff of Uxbridge to fight as a soldier. On the civic side, Lydia Taft voted in the 1756 town meeting, an act recorded as a first for colonial women in America. Her husband was Josiah Taft, a wealthy local landowner. The American Taft family's origins are deeply intertwined with Uxbridge and Mendon, a lineage that eventually reached Peter Rawson Taft, whose grandson William Howard Taft visited the Samuel Taft House.

  Quakers who migrated from Smithfield, Rhode Island, including Richard Mowry, settled in Uxbridge and built mills, railroads, and Conestoga wagon wheels. The Friends Meetinghouse, built around 1770, counted prominent abolitionists Abby Kelley Foster and Effingham Capron among its members. Capron and his spouse led a local anti-slavery society of 450 members. A formerly enslaved man named Brister Pierce, who had been a slave in Uxbridge, signed an 1835 petition to Congress demanding abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Uxbridge became one of the earliest centers for rural anti-slavery engagement in America, drawing leadership from Unitarian, Quaker, and later Congregational communities.

• 4. Mills, Looms, and Cashmere

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  Daniel Day built the first woolen mill in Uxbridge in 1809. By 1855, 560 local workers were producing two and a half million yards of cloth annually, enough to stretch more than fourteen thousand miles. Uxbridge eventually reached a peak of over twenty different industrial mills. Power looms arrived by 1820, and the town pioneered vertical integration of wool all the way through to finished clothing, cashmere wool-synthetic blends, wash-and-wear fabrics, and yarn spinning techniques.

  The Capron family mill, operated by John Sr., Effingham, and John W. Capron, pioneered satinets and woolen power looms in the United States. The company that grew from those roots, Bachman-Uxbridge, manufactured uniforms for the US Army through the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the nurse corps. It also produced the first dress uniforms for the United States Air Force. That shade became known as "Uxbridge Blue." Time magazine covered a proposed buyout that would have made Uxbridge Worsted the top woolen company in the country.

  Crown and Eagle Mill was described as a masterpiece of early industrial architecture. The Blanchard granite quarry provided curb stones to New York City, to the Statue of Liberty, and to regional public works. Bernat Yarn, one of the largest yarn companies in the United States, operated its largest plant in Uxbridge from the 1960s through the 1980s. Moses Taft's Central Woolen mill ran continuously through the Civil War, producing cloth for the Union Army.

• 5. IBM, Medicine, and Unusual Firsts

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  Eugene A. Ford, a Mississippi native, lived and worked in Uxbridge in the early 1900s, where he developed the first laboratory for IBM and served as the company's first chief engineer. Thomas J. Watson eventually moved Ford and his family to New York, but the origins of IBM's engineering foundation trace back to this small Massachusetts town.

  Samuel Willard, an early Uxbridge physician, ran the first hospital for mental illness in America. He was also considered a forerunner of modern psychiatry. The town's public health history is a mix of forward-looking and resistant impulses: Uxbridge voted against the smallpox vaccine, yet local government later approved women jurors in defiance of the Massachusetts Secretary of State, becoming the first Massachusetts town to do so. In 2009 the Board of Health made Uxbridge the third community in the United States to ban tobacco sales in pharmacies, though that decision was later reversed.

  Leonard White, a local physician and health officer, documented a malaria outbreak in 1896 that contributed to early advances in understanding malaria as a mosquito-borne disease. The town also hosted a historic company called Information Services, which managed subscription services for publications including The New Republic in the later twentieth century. Charles Vacanti, an anesthesiologist associated with Uxbridge, became known for work in tissue engineering and stem cells, including the famous Vacanti mouse.

• 6. Film, Parks, and Recent Life

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  The Great Gatsby was filmed partly in Uxbridge in 1974, followed by Oliver's Story in 1978, with production at Stanley Woolen Mill among the local locations. In 2021, the McCluskey School parking lot and the former Bernat Mill site were used for Netflix film crews. The Blackstone Valley National Historic Park now surrounds many of the old mills and river corridors, encompassing a thousand-acre Blackstone Canal Heritage State Park, nine miles of the Blackstone River Greenway, and a 567-acre wildlife refuge.

  Sixty Federalist homes were added to the fifty-four national and 375 state-listed historic sites, including Georgian Elmshade, where War Secretary Alphonso Taft recounted local family history at a famous reunion. Capron's wooden mill survived a 2007 fire at the Bernat Mill. In 2013, multiple fires damaged the town again, including a historic bank building and a Quaker home from the early 1800s.

  In 2017, a new fire station costing nine and a quarter million dollars was completed on Main Street next to Town Hall. Voters had approved the 14,365-square-foot station in 2015. The Uxbridge High Spartans won the 2023 Division 7 Super Bowl at Gillette Stadium with an undefeated record, then won the 2024 championship again against Mashpee. In January 2026, Police Officer Stephen Laporta was killed in the line of duty while assisting a motorist along an icy Route 146. Flags were flown at half-staff across Massachusetts in his honor. In 2025, the Arthur R. Taft Memorial Trust provided funding to preserve Farnum House, the site of Uxbridge's very first town meeting, now donated to the Uxbridge Historical Society.