The Bliss gristmill stood near this dam on the Palmer River for about 180 years, starting sometime before 1690. By the time of the American Revolution, the pond and dam also served a sawmill, a fulling mill owned by Joseph Goff, a cooperage, and a blacksmith’s shop. A slaughterhouse and tannery were around the corner on Locust Avenue and an iron forge on County Street at Route 118. In the early 1800s, Thomas Carpenter III bought the gristmill and sawmill and built a cotton mill on the north side of the street. The cotton mill and Goff’s fulling mill were then sold to Nelson and Darius Goff, who manufactured cotton wadding. [From Rehoboth, Massachusetts, Guide to Historic Sites]
A fortified house surrounded by a palisade was built in a corn field on property now owned by the Viall estate on Providence Street. A sign along Barney Road describes how it was during the King Phlip War to shelter Rehoboth residents in the Palmer’s River area. An attack on March 28, 1676 destroyed all of the buildings but the Block House saved all but one inhabitant, who had wandered too far away. A sketch of the structure was drawn by Dr. William Blanding as he remembered it standing in the late 1700s. [from Guide to Historic Sites]. Block House No. 1 was located on the property of Thomas Graeber on the Palmer River near 158 Wheeler Street.
Butterworth Falls in the Perryville Dam at the intersection of Danforth Street and Perryville Road.was constructed soon after the area was settled in the late 1600s. John Butterworth constructed a sawmill at the north side of Danforth Street prior to 1690. Butterworth owned a large farm that included what is now the nearby Rehoboth Country Club. The Carpenter family owned and operated this mill through the Revolutionary War and up to the mid-1800s, when it was purchased by the Perry family. That family operated a large turning mill on the south side of Danforth Street that produced tool handles as well as bobbins for the cotton manufacturing industry in the Blackstone Valley. The business lasted until the 1890s. A sawmill and gristmill operated on the site until the mid-1930s. [From Rehoboth, Massachusetts, Guide to Historic Sites]
Although most industry in the village area died out around 1880, the mill owners and their families continued to live here.
Town Meetings were held in what is now the American Legion hall, and the present-day Congregational Church was built in 1838. The Sabin Sawmill, built in 1695, was one of the first in the town.
Rehoboth Village is located around the intersection of Locust Avenue and Bay State Road.
Click here for a list of the early settlers and here for the early proprietors.
Click here for the MHC Reconnaissance Survey Town Report
Click here for the National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form for Historic Resources of Rehoboth
Click here for the Carpenter Museum and Blanding Library website
Click on the map below for a Google satellite map of the location.
