There’s More History Than Meets the Eye in Sudbury

Loring Parsonage is one of the oldest buildings in the town’s center. The house was originally built for Reverend Israel Loring as the minister’s parsonage. It was built in the early 1700s. The Hosmer House in town was built in 1793, which served as a general store, post office, ballroom in addition to a cobbler shop. It is now the headquarters of the Sudbury Historical Commission. The Wayside Inn Grist Mill was built in 1929 and still provides 5 tons of flour every year.

However, Sudbury’s history is more than old buildings.

Lee Swanson, curator of the Sudbury Historical Society, offered a deeper layer of history beyond what can be seen on a drive around town.

“First off, where we live right now is not originally Sudbury,” he explained. “The original Sudbury is actually Wayland.” In 1722, the west side of Sudbury was allowed to build a meetinghouse, allowing them to forego the difficult journey to the east side of the Sudbury River. The residents in the original Sudbury, were never able to forgive the minister from taking books from the East Parish and taking them to the west side of Sudbury. The town eventually split, and West Sudbury became the town of Wayland in 1935.

This is where a special vault currently in the Town Clerk’s office comes in.

Inside that vault, are “the earliest records of any town in America,” Swanson said. With those records, historians have been able to trace the original settlers of Sudbury, as well as the exact architecture of the first town meetinghouse.  Along with books, these records were taken from east Sudbury to the west, which allowed them to be saved and preserved for so many years, according to Swanson. 

Because of those records, a historian from Harvard was able to use them to trace settlers all the way back to England. The intensive historic and investigative study, titled “Puritan Village” by Sumner Chilton Powell, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964.

Sudbury also happens to have been the hollowed battlegrounds during King Philip’s War between English settlers and Native Americans fighting back against the white man’s destruction of their land and their food, according to Swanson. The war was the largest conflict in the Puritan New England colonies in the seventeenth century. Swanson said the battle lasted 36 hours over a 100 acre area, with Native Americans eventually defeating the colonists.

Fast forward 337 years later, the Historical Society in Town Hall has many of the relics of the past. Among their collection is documents and records from the eighteenth century, a Civil War period glass case, pieces from the old post office, and artifacts from every day life throughout every century in the town. Among one of their most interesting finds is the veneer of Babe Ruth’s piano. Rumored to have been thrown into Willis Pond by Ruth in a drunken rage, the piano’s presence at the bottom of the pond was thought to be a myth, until it was unearthed three months ago, Swanson said.

“We’re the institute of the memory of the town,” Swanson said. The artifacts and the rich history found in the Historical Society, is provided by “the generosity of the members, non-members and donators in the town,” Swanson said.

“What’s here serves as a reminder of how simple or how difficult things used to be done. It’s all history,” Swanson said.