Features
The bill above was from New Jersey, but it shows typical money of the colonial era.
by Joshua Vollmar
Shebuel Hobart, Thomas Farrington, Nathan Raymond, and Thomas Sackville Tufton have two things in common: they lived in Groton and were accused of crimes to do with fake money in the period of the Revolution.
During this period, forging money was a common crime. Due to...
by Bob Katzen, Beacon Hill Record
Thousands of bills were defeated in the 2020 session that ended in just a few weeks ago. Here are some of them and how they died.
• Donate Food (H 1969) - Defeated by being shipped off to a study committee: Allows restaurants and other food...
"Why did I climb it, they ask" . . . "Because it’s there." Foot steps in the snow ascending Gibbet Hill after the storm. Photo by Steve Lieman.
This colorized photo gives a sense of a younger, dynamic, creative Geroge S. Boutwell with a deep seriousness of purpose, while many black and white photos taken when he was an older man portray him as devoid of personality. Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Boutwell and the Groton History Center.
by Jeffrey Boutwell, Ph.D.
In 1835 at the age of 17, George Sewall Boutwell made the best decision of his life – he moved to Groton from the Boutwell family farm in Lunenburg. In responding to a help-wanted ad to work for Benjamin Dix, George would begin 70 years of living, working, and...
by Bob Katzen, BHR
Friday, February 19 at 5 p.m. is the deadline for legislation to be filed for consideration during the 2021-2022 legislative session. Many late-filed bills are admitted to the Legislature following the deadline, but the vast majority of proposals are filed by February 19...
In the 1700s there were two efforts to forge a new county from northern sections of Worcester and Middlesex counties with Groton being the capital city or county seat of this proposed county. There were many good and practical arguments for creating a new county at that time [and there still are], but it never happened. Groton would surely be a very differnt place today, looking more like Worcester than the small town we love. The map above is an approximation of where the borders would have been, for this hypothetical county which we have chosen to name Groton County. Since the second proposal of 1764, the borders and the names of many of the towns proposed for the county have changed so much that this map can only be an approximation of this imaginary Groton County.
by Joshua Vollmar
While the fact is often overlooked, Groton was a significantly more important town in centuries past than it is today; two
petitions from the Colonial period, about 30 years apart, offer a unique lens onto the town’s importance at the time. Both petitions called for...
by Don Layton, Harvard Center for Housing Studies.
Mr. Layton was the CEO of Freddie Mac from May 2012 until June 2019.
This past December 23, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) announced that, despite the severe pandemic-induced economic downturn, its index of house prices had...