Douglas

Where fields met factories and country met commerce.

If ever there was a place where the past, present and future coexist in one dynamic environment, then that place would be Douglas, Massachusetts. It is here you can still catch a glimpse of what it was like when fields met factories and country met commerce in the Valley where the Industrial Revolution was born.Douglas was an original agricultural community that evolved into a mill town, and a "stage coach" stop became a thriving commercial center.

Centuries before the arrival of the first Europeans, Douglas was inhabited by Nipmucs, an Algonquin people, who lived here in a settled agricultural and hunting society. In the 1720's, the first English-speaking settlers here established the town as New Sherborn, later renamed Douglas in 1746.

Over the next century, Douglas enhanced its agricultural economy with increasing commerce, becomming a crossroads for stagecoach tunpikes from Worcester to Providence and Boston to Hartford. Its growing number of taverns and wayside inns soon transformed Douglas into a hub for people and goods traveling through the Blackstone Valley. In addition, local grist mills turned grain into flour and saw mills processed lumber from Douglas's forests.

Douglas's East Village, now east Douglas, developed in the early 1800's when entrepreneurs established mills along the Mumford River. By harnessing the river's waterpower, they significantly increased the production of goods that for centuries had been made by hand. The area was known for the "Axe Shops" of the famous Douglas Axe Manufactoring Company. Later, as the Axe business declined, the mills were occupied by the equally famous Hayward and Schuster woolen mills, an important employer and supplier for the government during World War II.

While the mills have gone the way of the axe shops, Douglas remains a thriving community, grounded in a more diversified economy and commited to planned growth and economic development. In the fall of 2003 the community will celebrate a crowning achievement: the official opening of the new High School. Wallum Lake, located in the Douglas State forrest continues as a favorite recreational attraction.

Yet a place where 20th-century storefronts rest comfortably in 19th-century structures, and older buildings stand renovated nearby. Modern apartment grace old mills, while another produces contemporary industrial fabrics. A former livery stable holds commercial businesses, what was once a factory office is now a restaurant, and the E.N. Jenckes General Store is a historical museum. In Douglas, instead of bulldozing the past, residents have reclaimed it.