Life should be easier. That said, there sure are a lot of towns in Massachusetts. I'm not even considering the irrelevant parts out past Worcester. Eastern Massachusetts is bad enough.
I grew up in Duxbury, and eventually moved to Monponsett. Prior to my move to Monponsett, I had never heard of Monponsett. You could write that off to me being a moron, and you wouldn't be the first... but it also speaks to the theory that there are too many towns in eastern Massachusetts for a reasonable man to keep track of.
It didn't used to be this way. Various kings of England didn't have the ability to commit memorization time to all of those piddling towns in the Massachusetts swamps. The king was a busy man, and needed his memory for more pressing matters. Memory is finite. If a man who is obliged to breed within a limited pool of people knows where Rehoboth is, it means that he may not know who that pretty girl at his coronation is. He might mess around with the royal scepter and become his own uncle or something.
You are most likely playing for lower stakes than that, but it's still a pain if you have some auto parts or pizza or something to deliver, and neither you nor your GPS can really say whether you are in Marion, Wareham or Mattapoisett.
How would Henry VII handle that problem? Simple. Eliminate some variables, just like one of those mathematician guys. You gotta know stuff like that to be the king.
A man doesn't have to know where Wareham or Marion is if Wareham and Marion don't exist. Call the whole area "Rochester"... yeah, that's the ticket. This also saves a monarch the bother of learning how to spell "Mattapoisett." Just think regional.
Similar regional logic applied around the area eliminates bothersome memory issues in town-sized hunks. Not sure where Mansfield is? Sha-ZAM!!! No more Mansfield. Think that Cape Cod has too many towns? Ka-POW!!! Not any more.
Queen Anne probably didn't spend part of her thirties pumping gas, so I assume that she most likely had more on the ball than your faithful author here does. When she thought about her Massachusetts colonies, how did she visualize them?
This map may help:
We use the same basic map to describe this website's coverage area, although we refuse to give up Weymouth and Hull. I've had some luck dating in Weymouth, and Hull is just too damn cool to give up without a war. We even claim parts of Quincy. If the website makes more money or if we get an eager and well-located intern, we'll include the Islands.
This map of Plymouth Colony is very concise. 17 towns fill up what is now Plymouth, Britsol and Barnstable Counties. Bristol County has 20 towns today. It gets bothersome quickly. Honestly, can you really tell me where Berkley is? (Editor's Note: South Coast readers can substitute "Rockland" or "Holbrook" for "Berkley") You can see why the royals did what they did.
Would this work today?
Some problems do show up immediately. I'm sure that Brockton residents would love paying for Duxbury Beach seawall repairs. Padanaram residents would most likely not align politically with the meaner parts of Fall River. Plymouth seems too big, as does Middleboro, Dartmouth and Taunton. Governance of these areas would be unwieldy at best.
Other things stand out when pondering a shift to colonial-era town maps:
- Freetown, a backwater these days, is one of the Big 17 in this alternate reality. Rehoboth also seems to have extraordinary influence.
- Freetown (and parts of Fall River and Assonet) was purchased from the Wampanoags for "20 coats, two rugs, two iron pots, two kettles, one little kettle, eight pairs of shoes, six pairs of stockings, one dozen hoes, one dozen hatchets, and two yards of broadcloth."
- Plymouth looks a bit like Brazil.
- Scituate and Duxbury both enjoy a unique status as America's first suburbs. Building there was most likely spurred by the Great Colonial Hurricane... which is too bad, because we liked the idea of Duxbury being founded because 1636 Plymouth was getting just a little bit too crowded for one Myles Standish.
- Cape Cod is reduced to five towns with this map... Eastham, Sandwich, Barnstable, Yarmouth and Falmouth.
- Swansea, a tiny town these days, was also tiny then. They would have nearly doubled in size if a dispute with Rhode Island was worked out in their favor. They were also serving as a buffer zone with the Wampanoag-dominated area of Mount Hope, sort of a colonial Latvia.
- I'm not sure how they had the Worcester area worked out, but let the record show that Southboro was (and still is) north of Middleboro.
- The Mayor of Duxbury Beach claims rulership over Duxbury and all lands west to (and including) Bridgewater State University. She refuses to accept the various actions of incorporation of the western towns.
- Brockton used to be part of Duxbury.
- I think that Marshfield's borders have been unchanged since a 1640 dispute with Duxbury over Green Harbor was ironed out.
- Taunton could have built a Norton/Easton/Mansfield-sized casino within their original borders.
- Route 3 would have touched Scituate in this political (map) climate.
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