​The way New England towns were settled by the English was actually very common across Massachusetts. Religious dissenters (primarily Puritan) established communities where there was plenty of land and other natural resources and followed traditional English laws. Towns were built around the Meeting House, the central location of all things religious and political.
 
Residents were primarily farming families. Couples bore many children to work the family farms and faced the odds of losing some to diseases like smallpox or the flu. After a few generations in those early communities, there was not enough open land for the increasing number of growing families. Surveyors headed westward to find new areas for establishing new towns. For example, the early colonial town (or “Plantation”) of Sudbury, Massachusetts became crowded and a handful of young men set off to find a new home in the adjacent combined lands of what is now Marlborough, Hudson, Northborough, Westborough, and Southborough. In that manner, "Marlborough Plantation” was settled in 1656 and the first settlers lived near the center of modern Marlborough, farming land in the outer areas of the town.
 
Over subsequent generations, families continued to grow in number and needed to find more living space outside of the center of Marlborough Plantation.  A village a few miles west at Lake Chauncy sprung up (the "west borough"), where farmers of the western stretch of the Plantation (Northborough and Westborough combined) could live closer to where they worked during the day. However, the new village was inconveniently far from the Plantation Meeting House; it was a slow and hilly trip back to the meeting house every Sunday. It followed that once there was enough people living in Chauncy to warrant building their own meeting house, hiring their own minister, and “managing their own affairs,” the villagers petitioned for separation from Marlborough. In 1717, the new independent town of Westborough was officially established and comprised the lands of modern Northborough and Westborough.
 
When the Westborough meeting house moved from Lake Chauncy to three miles south to the center of modern day Westborough, there were well over 30 families living in the “north part” of the town who again found themselves facing a very long and difficult trip back and forth on required meeting days. Can you just imagine the families, on an early wintery Sunday morning, trying to be up, dressed, and ready to march down the hazardous road [what is now Rt. 135] to church in Westborough Center? The devoted northern Puritan families were outraged even more by the inequity of their situation when finding themselves at funerals without a minister; he himself did not like to make the long trek up north to Brigham Street Old Burial Ground. To address these religious concerns, the northern family heads met and petitioned in 1744 to become a precinct of Westborough. Note that a “precinct” was distinctly different from a “town”: the newly formed Northern Precinct would have its own meeting house and preacher but would remain politically and fiscally a part of the town of Westborough.
 
Over the two decades following the 1744 petition, there were lingering serious challenges because the Northern Precinct was not fully independent from Westborough. For example, elected northern officials found it difficult to travel south to important town meetings and represent the interests of the northern families. Another problem was that the Northern Precinct was viewed as only one of the town's three school districts and the teacher was not available full-time in any single district. Adding fuel to the flame, no funding was made for Northern Precinct schools, highways, or other types of community improvements.
 
To finally achieve the independence they had sought and desired for so long, town founders successfully presented a petition to the General Court in Boston. The District of Northborough was officially formed on the 15 January 1766 and the district  became a fully-fledged town on 23 August 1775. 
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Transcription of the original Act that separated Northborough from Westborough

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SOURCES:
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Clifford, John Henry et al. The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay: to Which are Prefixed the Charters of the Province with Historical and Explanatory Notes, and an Appendix, Volume IV. Boston, Massachusetts: Wright & Potter, 1890.
 
DeForest, Heman Packard and Edward Craig Bates. The History of Westborough, Massachusetts. Westborough Massachusetts: Town of Westborough, 1891.
 
Kent, Josiah Coleman. Northborough History.  Newton, Massachusetts: Garden City Press, 1921.
 
Parkman, Ebenezer. The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman (1703-1782): First Part, Three Volumes in One (1719-1755). Francis G. Walett, editor. Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1974.

Susan (Grout) Holbrook Gale 

....was born in Westborough, MA in 1797. She was the eldest of the two daughters of Esquire Seth Grout and wife Susannah Haskell. When Susan was 23 years old, she married Daniel Holbrook Jr. of Northborough and they settled into a home on the Turnpike Road in Westborough.

Her father owned and operated “Grout’s Store” in downtown Westborough, where husband Daniel was also a merchant. Barely five months after Susan married Daniel, their son Charles was born, which at that time could have proven scandalous. However, possibly due to the good standing of the respectable family in town, no one publically noted the short pregnancy. The couple also had the resources to send son Charles to attend the Worcester County Manual Labor High School, the private boys school that eventually become the renowned Worcester Academy of Worcester, Massachusetts.
 
Susan was only 25 when her father died and she inherited both his business and real estate. Notably uncommon for women of that time, she retained sole ownership of the store, along with several other Westborough properties that belonged to her late father. Given that her father was confident that she was able to manage real estate and that her husband freely worked side-by-side with her at her store, she can certainly be characterized as a capable, independent, and intelligent woman of her time.

A stamp collector recently listed an envelope on eBay for its postal cancellation. As a genealogist, I saw it more specifically as an envelope that happened to still have a letter from 1875 still inside. As serendipity usually has it with these things, the story told by a visitor to Northborough, MA has an intriguing plot, curious characters, and an ending that could only have been written this afternoon by myself and a willing fellow mystery-solver. 

Mrs. Viola Holbrook, staying at the home of her Aunt Susan's husband Cyrus Gale, wrote to her own husband back home in New York City about such quaint things as slipper orders and glove sizes. She also recounted what she learned in several letters she had received over a very short time: that her Aunt Nellie's fiancé had cheated on her and called off the wedding that was to happen within the month. Nellie had fled to a hotel in NYC to escape her shame and hide her sorrow. Viola, having none of that, instructed her husband to find Nellie and console her in Viola's stead.

Who was Viola Holbrook and why was she visiting a small town in MA, so far from the social buzz of Manhattan? Who was Nellie and how exactly was she related to the Holbrooks? Did Nellie ever marry…and whom?

The strategy: (1) Read the letter. Many times. Make note of places, names, and possible relationships. (2) Sketch out the family trees of each identifiable person mentioned in the letter. (3) Research each person on the trees to locate correlating evidence and establish how the people are related. 

Tips: (1) Nicknames (such as "Nellie") aren't always used in historical documents. Search using the more formal version of common nicknames for better results. (2) Family relationships (references to "aunt" or "Mother") may be for a spouse's family as well. 

The bonus: Ask the question "What happened next?" to initiate another research plan. In this case, we found that the scorned bride-to-be took back her philandering fiancé to eventually live in North Carolina with their servants. Who knew a simple census enumeration could tell such a complicated story about betrayal, sorrow, forgiveness, and deep devotion?