Plumber in Franklin Town, MA

Franklin was first settled by Europeans in 1660 and officially incorporated during the American Revolution. The town was formed from the western part of the town of Wrentham, and it was officially incorporated on March 2, 1778; its designated name at incorporation was to be Exeter. However, the town’s citizens opted to call it Franklin, in honor of the statesman Benjamin Franklin, the first municipality in the U.S. to be so named.

It was hoped that Benjamin Franklin would donate a bell for a church steeple in the town, but he donated 116 books instead, including Night-Thoughts, James Janeway’s Invisible Realities, and the works of John Locke. On November 20, 1790, it was decided that the volumes would be lent to the residents of Franklin for free via its library, which has been in operation since then as the Franklin Public Library making this the oldest running public library in the nation. The Ray Memorial Library building was dedicated in 1904. In 1990, on the library’s bicentennial, its staff published a booklet, “A History of America’s First Public Library at Franklin Massachusetts, 1790 ~ 1990” to commemorate America’s first public library and book collection.

The town is also home to the birthplace of America’s father of public education, Horace Mann. The town is also home to what may have been the nation’s oldest continuously operational one-room school house (Croydon, New Hampshire’s school dates to 1780, but there is debate as to whether it is truly “one room”). The Red Brick School was started in 1792, its building constructed in 1833, and was operational until 2008. St. Mary’s Catholic Church, located in central Franklin and built by Matthew Sullivan, is the largest Catholic parish in the Boston Archdiocese with some 15,000 members.