s in 1675 Brookfield was first settled by Europeans in 1660 and was officially incorporated in 1718. The town was settled by men from
Ipswich as part of the
Quaboag Plantation lands. In August 1675,
King Philip's War reached central Massachusetts. Brookfield, one of the most isolated settlements in the colony, was attacked by Nipmuck forces. After an ambush, the town was besieged. For two days the townsfolk, consisting of 80 people, sought shelter in the garrison house while the rest of the town was completely destroyed. The settlement lay abandoned for twelve years. During the winter of 1776,
General Henry Knox passed through the town with cannon from
Fort Ticonderoga to end the
Siege of Boston. A marker along
Route 9 commemorates his route.
Bathsheba Spooner In March 1778, Joshua Spooner, a
wealthy farmer in Brookfield, was beaten to death and his body stuffed down a well. Four people were hanged for the crime: two
British soldiers, a young
Continental soldier, and Spooner's wife,
Bathsheba, who was charged with instigating the
murder. She was 32 years old and five months pregnant when executed. Newspapers described the case as "the most extraordinary crime ever perpetrated in New England." Bathsheba was the mother of three young children, and in her own words felt "an utter aversion" for her husband, who was known to be an abusive drunk. A year before the murder, she took in and nursed a sixteen-year-old Continental soldier who was returning from a year's enlistment under
George Washington. The two became lovers and conceived a child.
Divorces were all but impossible for women at that time, and
adulteresses were stripped to the waist and publicly whipped. Bathsheba's pregnancy occasioned a series of desperate plots to murder her husband, finally brought to fruition with the aid of two British
deserters from
General John Burgoyne's defeated army. As the daughter of the state's most prominent and despised
Loyalist, Bathsheba bore the brunt of the political, cultural, and gender prejudices of her day. When she sought a stay of execution to deliver her baby, the Massachusetts Council rejected her petition, and she was promptly hanged before a crowd of 5,000 spectators.
Washington's visit Across from the former Brookfield Inn on West Main Street (Route 9) is a memorial that designates this part of the road as the George Washington Memorial Highway. In 1789, the first president of the United States traveled through five of the
New England states. This tour has become the basis for all of the "George Washington slept here" claims—and although Washington watered his horses here, he never slept in Brookfield. It seems his party would have spent the night in Brookfield except that the innkeeper, Mrs. Bannister, was in bed with a terrible
headache. When awakened, she mistook him for a
college president and sent him on to the neighboring town of
Spencer. On learning of her mistake, she supposedly said: "Bless me! One look at that good man would have cured my aching head."
Other Brookfields Lands of the town have given rise to three others—
North Brookfield in 1812,
West Brookfield in 1848, and
East Brookfield in 1920. ==Geography==