Sturbridge: Graphite, Settlers, and New England's Living Museum

Sturbridge, Massachusetts sits at the eastern end of Interstate Eighty-Four where it meets the Massachusetts Turnpike, a crossroads that fits its history. Settlers from Medfield arrived around seventeen twenty-nine, drawn to land the Native Americans had called Tantiousques, where as early as sixteen forty the English had noticed graphite could be mined. The town was incorporated in seventeen thirty-eight and named for Stourbridge in England.

For most of its life Sturbridge was an agricultural town. Then in nineteen forty-six the Wells family, local industrialists who had spent decades collecting early American tools, clocks, and furnishings, opened Old Sturbridge Village on more than two hundred acres nearby. That living history museum, now the largest living history museum in New England, put Sturbridge on the map as a destination and became the economic anchor it remains today.