The Tortuous Road from the “Greenwoods” to the Town of Otis

By Peter Cameron

May 2025

I was recently contacted by a reader who asked me to explain how Otis came to be. So here is the long and winding road that resulted in the town of Otis.

The area that would become Otis in the early 1700s was known as The Greenwoods. It was a vast wild and swampy area and one of the last unpopulated areas in western Massachusetts Bay Colony. The General Court, during the French and Indian War, recognized that the unpopulated land surrounding the strategic Albany to Boston Road (later to be called the Knox Trail) was a military liability. In 1737, to rectify this, the General Court laid out four new townships in the area. They were listed by number only, but would eventually become towns. #1 became Tyringham, #2 was New Marlboro, #3 was Sandisfield and #4 was Becket. The General Court had the towns surveyed and awarded lots to proprietors, mostly rich, politically connected folks, who had no intention of living there. Quickly a problem came up. A portion of the lots in #1 Tyringham overlapped with the town of Lee and had been previously granted to other people. The proprietors, feeling cheated out of their land, raised a stink at the General Court.

Wedged between Tyringham to the west, Becket to the north and Blandford to the east, were vacant Province Lands owned by the king, and an adjoining uninhabited tract known as the North 11,000 Acres. The Court’s solution in 1739 was to take a portion of the Province Lands, have it surveyed and award it as substitution or equivalent land for those whose lands had been erroneously granted to others. Since most of the mistakes originated in #1 Tyringham the new area was named the Tyringham Equivalent.

The original proprietors quickly sold their lots to true settlers and the Tyringham Equivalent slowly became a farming community. On February 27, 1773, a warrant for a town meeting was issued by the General Court. This action was required for incorporation into a township. The Tyringham Equivalent became the town of Loudon, named for a British General. Located in today’s geography, it was lands east of the Farmington River.

Thirteen years later, in 1786, the parcel known as the North 11,000 Acres, to the west of Loudon, was designated as the District of Bethlehem and quickly settled by folks predominantly from Palmer, Massachusetts.

The Town of Loudon was quickly organized and set up a politically well-oiled machine. The first recorded town meeting in 1773 appointed selectmen and filled other town offices. Their records were well written and still exist at the Otis Town Hall. Bethlehem on the other hand was poorly organized as a government entity and quickly fell behind in both state and county taxes. Starting in 1808 Bethlehem began asking Loudon to merge. In June 1809 Loudon agreed and the two became the new Town of Loudon. The people of Bethlehem immediately requested a change in the town’s name. Months of debate failed to come up with a new moniker.

In early 1781, the town sent a young lawyer, Paul Larkcom, to the General Court in Boston. He had with him a petition to rename the town with the new name left blank. He was in Boston for some time and became enamored with Harrison Gray Otis, Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Otis was a politically powerful man who boasted a lavish lifestyle. Larkcom penned the name Otis in the blank for the new town name and on June 13th, 1810, presented it to the General Court where it was approved. The Town of Loudon was gone and, in its place Otis, was born.