Gleasondale, Massachusetts
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Gleasondale is a village straddling the border between the towns of
Hudson Hudson may refer to: People * Hudson (given name) * Hudson (surname) * Hudson (footballer, born 1986), Hudson Fernando Tobias de Carvalho, Brazilian football right-back * Hudson (footballer, born 1988), Hudson Rodrigues dos Santos, Brazilian f ...
and Stow in Middlesex County,
Massachusetts Massachusetts ( ; ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Maine to its east, Connecticut and Rhode ...
, United States. It is located along the
Assabet River The Assabet River is a small, long river located about west of Boston, Massachusetts, United States.U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map, accessed October 3, 2011 The Assabet rises ...
. For many decades it was home to various mills, though it is now primarily residential. According to the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), Gleasondale is a "populated place" named after Benjamin W. Gleason and Samuel J. Dale.


History

Indigenous people There is no generally accepted definition of Indigenous peoples, although in the 21st century the focus has been on self-identification, cultural difference from other groups in a state, a special relationship with their traditional territ ...
lived in what became central Massachusetts for thousands of years prior to European settlement. Indigenous oral histories, archaeological evidence, and European settler documents attest to historic settlements of the
Nipmuc The Nipmuc or Nipmuck people are an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands, who historically spoke an Eastern Algonquian languages, Eastern Algonquian language, probably the Loup language. Their historic territory Nippenet, meaning 'the f ...
people near and along the Assabet River. Nipmuc settlements on the Assabet intersected with the territories of three other related Algonquian-speaking peoples: the
Massachusett The Massachusett are a Native American tribe from the region in and around present-day Greater Boston in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The name comes from the Massachusett language term for "At the Great Hill," referring to the Blue Hills ...
,
Pennacook The Pennacook, also known by the names Penacook and Pennacock, were Algonquian Indigenous people who lived in what is now Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and southern Maine. They were not a united tribe but a network of politically and culturally ...
, and
Wampanoag The Wampanoag, also rendered Wôpanâak, are a Native Americans in the United States, Native American people of the Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands, Northeastern Woodlands currently based in southeastern Massachusetts and forme ...
. McAdow 1990: pp. 105–109 European settlement in what would become Gleasondale began around 1750 when a certain Whitman family and Ebenezer Graves constructed a dam and lumber mill on the
Assabet River The Assabet River is a small, long river located about west of Boston, Massachusetts, United States.U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map, accessed October 3, 2011 The Assabet rises ...
. The Whitmans—who owned the land and mills—sold them to Timothy Gibson in 1770, who in turn sold them to Abraham Randall a few years later. For many years the area was known as Randall's Mills. In 1813 the Rock Bottom Cotton & Woolen Company built a wood-framed
textile mill Textile manufacturing or textile engineering is a major industry. It is largely based on the conversion of fibre into yarn, then yarn into fabric. These are then dyed or printed, fabricated into cloth which is then converted into useful good ...
at Randall's Mills and the emerging village and new post office became known as Rock Bottom. McAdow 1990: p. 72 In 1815 Randall sold the mill to Joel Cranston and Silas Felton, business partners based in Feltonville, a village of
Marlborough, Massachusetts Marlborough is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 41,793 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Marlborough became a prosperous industrial town in the 19th century and made the transition to high ...
, which would later become the town of Hudson. In 1830 Cranston and Felton sold the mill to Benjamin Poor. In 1849 business partners Benjamin W. Gleason and Samuel J. Dale purchased the mill. They built the existing five-story brick mill building in 1854 after the original wooden building burned on May 8, 1852. In 1898 the village was renamed Gleasondale in honor of Gleason and Dale, and the brick mill building became known as Gleasondale Mills. On March 31, 1911, Phineas Feather—a former superintendent at Gleasondale Mills—attempted to murder mill owner Alfred Gleason with a pistol after confronting him about money he felt Gleason owed him. Another superintendent, Charles E. Roberts, disarmed Feather but was wounded in the struggle. A certain Robert J. Bevis and other individuals intervened further; Bevis and Feather were also wounded. No one died from their injuries, and after a stint at Bridgewater State Hospital Feather was released in 1915. Until its closure in 1965, the Gleasondale Station—one of two train stations in Hudson—served the village. It was originally operated by the Central Massachusetts Railroad Company, and later by
Boston & Maine The Boston and Maine Railroad was a United States, U.S. Class I railroad in northern New England. It was chartered in 1835, and became part of what was the Pan Am Railways network in 1983 (most of which was purchased by CSX in 2022). At the e ...
. The station's name is printed as "Rocky-bottom" in an 1888 map of the Central Massachusetts Railroad. Today Gleasondale has a few residential buildings, plus a small industrial complex in the old mill buildings. It does not have a large enough population to support a post office, and uses the same zip code as Stow, 01775. The dam remains, even though it no longer provides hydropower.


Notes


References

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External links


Gleasondale, MA at Google MapsGleasondale Profile at HomeTownLocator.com
{{authority control Villages in Middlesex County, Massachusetts Villages in Massachusetts