Celebrating birthdays is a lot of fun, and when a town has a big one, it’s usually a chance to pull out all the stops and have a real blast.

When New Ipswich celebrated its 200th in 2000, it celebrated for a year with a special event during each month.

Wilton will be 250 next year, by pure coincidence the year it celebrates Old Home Days, which it does every five years. Plans are underway for several special events, including an update of the little history published for the 200th celebrations in 1939. The Historical Society has undertaken that big job.

Brookline will be 250 in 2019, and has formed a committee to plan for the event. Six years may sound like a long time, but it really isn’t if you want to get everyone involved and maybe plan to update the town history, as they may do.

Some of the town’s early history came to light recently when the police station was moved. Documents dating to the late 1700s were found in a box. Included in the find was a handwritten letter from 1782 or 1783, when the town was named Raby.

Brookline has a colorful history, according to my favorite source for accounts of the old days, “The History of Hillsboro County,” published in 1885. According to Ithmar Sawtelle, author of the Brookline entry, the town was composed of the west part of Hollis, northeast part of Townsend and southwest part of what was Groton Gore, later called The Mile Slip. Apparently, these disparate parts did not get together socially in the beginning.

The area was originally part of Dunstable, a 200-square-mile land grant that included all of Nashua and parts of all of the surrounding towns.

It was divided into two parts when the line between Massachusetts and New Hampshire was finally decided by a commission named by the English king.

That setting of the state line left some residents unhappy with the province in which they ended up.

The town was established in 1769 as Raby. Sawtelle says that name came from County Durham in northern England, a place where some of the early settlers had originated. In 1786, the Legislature approved moving a ¾-mile strip of Hollis to Raby. Such changes in borders generally annoyed the people involved.

That early town was one of subsistence farmers so poor, Sawtelle said, that at the end of the Revolutionary War, “The town could not support a school or a minister of the gospel.” Nor could it afford a bridge across the river, a circumstance that hindered commerce and communication.

These conditions apparently provided a place for various outlaws, and “Raby was held in such low esteem” by surrounding towns, Sawtelle said, “they decided on a name change.”

In 1798, the residents agreed on Brookline. Sawtelle doesn’t give a reason for the choice, but those looking into the town’s history will find and celebrate it.

The change in name, or perhaps in attitude and generally improving circumstances, apparently worked. A Congregational meetinghouse was built in 1838 and dedicated in 1839. Industry came, farms were prosperous and Brookline grew.

But the town was never large. During the Civil War, 66 men enlisted, but there weren’t enough at any one time to form a company. They joined other local regiments, as well as the Navy.

The history notes that “14 legal voters” didn’t return from the war. Brookline men were frequently listed as being from the towns where they enlisted, a circumstance Sawtelle found annoying.

Brookline residents have a big job ahead of them. The committee members would probably welcome any help they can get.

I wish them well.

Keep up with the past with Another Perspective, which runs every other Thursday in The Telegraph. Jessie Salisbury can be reached at 654-9704 or jessies@tellink.net.

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