9-16-2023 10:09pm

Wrentham's 350th Parade Belongs to Franklin, Too

Alan Earls Editor

Above, Cheryl Hobbs of Franklin helping to prep the Wrentham Lions float for the 350th parade yesterday morning.

Wrentham, now officially 350 years old, has been celebrating that momentous occasion for most of the year, including a town birthday party several weeks ago and, yesterday, the large and lively Wrentham 350th parade.

Of course, Franklin left Wrentham, mostly amicably in 1778, declaring its independence just two years after the 13 colonies gave the brush to Great Britain. But a substantial part of Franklin's history occurred when still part of Wrentham.

Historian James C. Johnston writes:

Unionville [the part of town near Garelick, BJ's and Forge Park Station], literally Union Village, was a village of the Town of Wrentham long before there was a Franklin. I live in the only inhabited house in the Old Village of Unionville, once cursed by the witch Moll Sheckel in the mid-eighteenth century. Oliver Pond, a prominent citizen of Wrentham, and later of Franklin, was an innkeeper and owner of a grist mill and 2200 acres of land in Unionville, in point of fact, Pond Street is just one of the boundaries of his original holdings.

Active in the local aspect of the American Revolution, Oliver Pond helped organize anti-British resistance, as did his cousin Oliver Pond, whose house stands today on the grounds of the old Wrentham State School, who eventually became a General. Unionville's Oliver Pond's house survives in Unionville today where I am the last and only citizen living in that ancient vicinity and relict of Old Wrentham.