Darting onto Rte 27 at Coolidge Street, it's easy to overlook the Massachusetts Bay Tercentennial Commission's 1930 sign commemorating the state's 300th birthday, which reads

SHERBORN

SETTLED IN 1652 AND CALLED

BOGGASTOW. BECAME A TOWN 

IN 1674.

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      While the Commission's century-old marker's claim is accurate, its omissions are also critical. Indeed, the assertion that the land was "settled" in 1652 implies that it was somehow unsettled prior to that point, and either the existing occupants didn't count, or the area was a vacant earthen palette on which to paint history's forthcoming dominant narrative. We know, of course, that the land which would become Sherborn has a far more ancient human story to tell, one that's mostly understood through the archaeological record and oral history, as well as historians' more recent work over the past two generations.*

 

     Originally Native American Indian land on the territorial fringes between tribes, at different points the Massachusett and Nipmuc people made their homes alongside the current town's ponds and streams (see gallery maps below).  Centuries of semi-nomadic life would change as the 17th century dawned, when a hideous demographic catastrophe began, preceding more widespread English colonization. Early European exploration and fishing expeditions unwittingly introduced microorganisms that over time decimated the Native populations of New England and beyond.

 

     As the mid-17th and early 18th centuries unfolded, a small number of English farmers found their way to what would become Sherborn. Recent evidence revealed in Paul LaCroix's important excavation appears to show that these early colonizers built a garrison house at the Sherborn/Millis/Medfield line that likely doubled as a small yet vibrant trading post and even a bloom foundry dating as far back as the 1640's. 

 

Following an uneasy, and at times brutal, co-habitation during the 17th century, tensions exploded in the 1676 King Philip War, which resulted in the near eradication or enslavement of most Native American Indians of the region. During the mid-17th and early 18th centuries, English farmers found their way to what would become Sherborn, the English town eventually recognized on the sign at Dowse's Corner some 300 years later.

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*One of these historians is UMass/Lowell scholar Christoph Strobel, who visited Sherborn in early April and discussed his excellent 2020 book Native Americans of New England. 

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For more on Paul LaCroix's fascinating work, see his book Bogastow Farms Stone House Archaeological Excavation. 

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Maps below come from Richard W. Wilkie and Jack Tager, Historical Atlas of Massachusetts. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.