Pepperell’s Birthday Bash

Happy birthday, Pepperell! With the roots of Massachusetts stretching right back to the founding of this nation, it’s not surprising that over the past several years, cities and towns across the state have been lighting very large birthday candles.

In 2025, the local focus will be on Pepperell. It began as a community of settlements from Groton on scattered farms and river crossings on the Nashua and Nissitissit Rivers in the 1720s, became Groton West Parish in 1742, a district in 1753 and a town on August 23, 1775.

The community’s birthday party was a year-long celebration that featured a reenactment of the raising of the Liberty Flag on September 7, 2024. This event commemorated the 250th anniversary of when local residents first raised Pepperell’s flag in response to British oppression, demonstrating their fierce loyalty to the ideals of liberty and justice.

The 1774 Pepperell District Meeting record states: “This being a time when the civil liberty of this province are unjustly infringed upon, when the ministry of Old England have endeavored to take away our Charter rights and privileges and the people of this province very much disturbed, every one looking after English liberties as departing from North America when congresses are appointed and appointing and the struggles very high, the people of this District prepared and raised a pole by the name of Liberty Pole the height of which was one hundred feet on the common directly before the Publick Meeting House door on the 29th day of August A.D. 1774 with a flag of Blew (sic) and red cloth five yards long and four breadths wide with convenience to hoist it to the top of the pole with ease.”

Another historical re-enactment, “The Women Who Guarded the Bridge,” is planned for May 3, 2025. The re-enactment features Pepperell’s local heroine Prudence Wright, who assembled a band of women dressed in men’s clothing to guard the bridge over the Nashua River in Pepperell, at the beginning of the Revolutionary War.

“Their strong will and bravery,” the town’s website notes, “resulted in the capture of a British spy in late April of 1775.” Previously re-enacted by the Town’s Covered Bridge Committee in 2010 at the grand re-opening of the Pepperell Covered Bridge and by the DAR in Pepperell’s annual Fourth of July Parade, this historic event is being brought back by popular demand.

The 2025 re-enactment will take place at the Prudence Wright Scenic Overlook, alongside the historic Pepperell Covered Bridge, on land owned by the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries & Wildlife. The Prudence Wright Overlook and the Pepperell Covered Bridge are symbols of the struggles and successes that occurred outside the battlefields of Lexington, Concord and Boston during our ancestors’ fight for independence.

And, yes, there’s more! This birthday party will run throughout late 2024 and well into 2025, so stay tuned! You can follow the town’s evolving plans for this celebration by following Pepperell’s 250th Celebration on Facebook.