Strawberry Hill History

Anyone who has walked, jogged or bicycled in Leicester can attest to the fact that Leicester is a town of hills. Each hill has its own story to tell. Cherry Valley boasts Bald Hill, so called because it was cleared for cultivation before the first English settlers arrived. Also in the east is Denny Hill with its breath-taking panorama of Worcester and points east. This view was forever captured on canvas by artist Ralph Earle in his A View From Denny Hill. On the border of the north village stands Carey Hill, where legend says Arthur Carey, Leicester’s first non-native settler, lived in his cave in the late 1600s. To the north-west rises Moose Hill, the town’s highest elevation, and, to the west, Mt. Pleasant, where stands an estate once desired by the father of the King of France. To the south, Dead Horse Hill undulates in three mounds towards Main South in Worcester. This hill takes its name, not from the number of horses who expired carrying heavy loads up the hill, but from the unsuspecting steeds who were run over by their run-away wagons hauling goods down the hill!

At the core of all these hills rests perhaps the most traveled elevation, site of the first settlement and, today, the center of town and the campus of Becker College. When the first speculators arrived in this part of Central Massachusetts, they discovered a luxurious growth of wild strawberries covering much of the terrain. The local Indians called this region "Towtaid." Early settlers dubbed it "Strawberry Hill." It was here that many of the town’s most influential citizens, among them Samuel May and Joshua Clapp, built their homes. Strawberry Hill was the inspiration for the most recent pictorial history of Leicester, Where the Wild Strawberries Grow, written in conjunction with the Town’s 275^th Anniversary.