Town Meeting is first held in Dorchester.

(OS-10/8) The first town meeting in today’s U.S., it is held at Lyceum Hall [the First Church in Dorchester]. Residents choose 12 men as “townsmen” or “selectmen,” who will meet monthly to manage the town business and decide that “for the general good and well ordering of the affayres of the Plantation their shall be every Moondeday . . . a generall meeting of the inhabitants . . . “to sette (and sett downe) such orders as may tend to the generall good.” The ordinance is considered the first home rule document in American history and the first to establish a representative town government. The town meeting is soon adopted Boston, Roxbury, and Cambridge, and becomes the model for local government throughout much of New England well into the twentieth century.