Timothy Ruggles, whose gravesite we visited on our June cemetery tour, was minister of the Rochester Congregational Church beginning in 1710 and continuing for 58 yrs. His father Samuel of Roxbury for quite some time owned proprietary rights in the land of Hardwick in Worcester County. Hardwick, also called the “Elbows,” was mostly unsettled when Rev. Ruggles visited the area in 1732. At that time, he began to promote the area for settlement. Just as Rochester had been settled in part by men from Scituate and Sandwich and other area towns, quite a few Rochester families decide to move west, beginning in 1732 and up until the start of the Revolutionary War.
Of Rev. Ruggles’ twelve children, six sons emigrated to Hardwick. The most well-known of those six was Timothy Ruggles Jr., a lawyer in Rochester, who moved to Hardwick in 1753. Having been an officer in the Indian Wars and having served as a Massachusetts delegate to the Stamp Act Congress in New York, his political loyalties to the English King began to put him out of step with many of his neighbors and countrymen.
He perhaps felt more comfortable in Hardwick, knowing the town was named for an English nobleman. In 1762, he introduced the Hardwick Country Fair. However, independence fever was spreading across the colonies, and his neighbors turned against him. His home was mobbed and eventually burned. He, along with most of New England’s Tories moved to Nova Scotia in 1776 when Washington’s troops forced the British evacuation of Boston.
We know that at least some of his children remained in Hardwick. Her father to an older man, Joshua Spooner, married off his 19 yr. old daughter, Bathsheba. The story of that marriage and the subsequent events that have secured a place in history for Bathsheba Ruggles Spooner will be told by Andrew Noone at the Rochester Historical Museum on September 21 at 7:00. We hope you will join us to see how her story ended.
Today, Hardwick, incorporated in 1739, is home to about 2600 residents. There is a large, white Congregational Church, and there are areas that provide beautiful views of the Quabbin Reservoir. The country fair that Timothy Ruggles, Jr. began is now the oldest continuous country fair in the United States.
By Connie Eshbach