Lincoln Town History
Colonial Period
In the early seventeenth century the Massachusetts Bay Company, a British trading company, issued land in coastal areas to wealthy Puritans, whose sons and grandsons soon moved inland to establish farms. The land these Europeans occupied was at the time the tribal land of the Massachusett, with whom they negotiated the terms of sale and the mutual obligations between the two communities.
In Colonial times towns were central villages surrounded by farms and forests. Some people living in the area that would become Lincoln felt they lived too far from their meeting house to get to worship or take part in civic affairs, grumbling about the roads, or disliking the theology of the church ministry. They wanted their own meeting house.
Residents of eastern Concord, along with parts of Lexington and Weston, petitioned the Great and General Court in 1734 to create a separate town. The Court refused. The residents failed in their request again the next year. But in 1746, the Court agreed to the formation of a “Second Precinct of Concord, Lexington, and Weston.”
The residents built their new meeting house in 1747 on land donated by Edward Flint. But the precinct craved still more self-governance. Roads remained a problem, neighboring towns refusing to help build new roads or improve existing ones. In 1754 the Court approved the incorporation of the Town of Lincoln. Influential resident Judge Chambers Russell named the town after his ancestral home in Lincolnshire, England.
On April 26, 1754, the new town of Lincoln held its first Town Meeting. Voters chose five Selectmen to oversee a community of nearly 700 people (twenty-three of whom were enslaved adults). New roads soon radiated from town center.
Before the Revolutionary War, Lincoln was primarily a farming community. Other trades included blacksmiths, coopers, cordwainers, housewrights, millers, ropemakers, sawyers, tanners, and weavers.
Images from the Archives
Lincoln Book of Records: Petition to Form Precinct, 1744
Lincoln Book of Records, Legislature Approval of Second Precinct, April 1746
Lincoln Granted 2nd Precinct, 1746
Map "2nd Precinct" from MacLean: Map showing how the sections of Lexington, Concord, and Weston were put together to form Lincoln, eventually known as “Nip Town" , "nipping" itself out of adjacent towns. Note where supporters and opponents of these adjoining towns were located. Those closest to what would become Lincoln's center largely supported splitting from their town. Those further from that hub were largely against it.
Kerry Glass: History of Lincoln Ways—mapping the development of roadways in Lincoln: 1636 - 1670
Kerry Glass: History of Lincoln Ways—mapping the development of roadways in Lincoln: The Center Emerges, 1735 - 1755
Lincoln First Record of Births and Deaths, 1754 - 1811 (click to see the entire the book in DigitalCommonwealth.org)
Kerry Glass' report, The Nathan Brown Farm, provides a fascinating window on to 300 years of Lincoln's history, encapsulated in the history of the Nathan Brown Farm. To download a free copy, visit the LHS Bookstore.
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