top of page

​COMMON GROUND

THE HEART OF STURBRIDGE

The Town Common is more than a green where events are held — the Town Hall and the Federated Church are on Common land, as is the Publick House lawn across the street.


 

Sturbridge, Mass., is known to schoolchildren and their elders across a broad swath of New England for Old Sturbridge Village, a re-creation of an 1830s New England settlement. But although the Village, which opened to the public in 1946, has an absorbing and colorful history of its own, the original old Sturbridge village lies scarcely a mile to the east. Here, the town’s earliest organized settlers cleared a Town Common and built the town’s first Meetinghouse in 1734, establishing an enduring center of commerce and community — the true and still-beating heart of the town.

© 2013 by Ken Heidel. Proudly created with Wix.com

Records Preserved: Author and historian Brian Burns recently completed digitizing half of a major collection of town documents that had been donated to Old Sturbridge Village.

• The Sturbridge Historical Commission

• The Sturbridge Recreation Department schedules events on The Common

• The Sturbridge Tourist Association 

News 3

bottom of page