History of the 'Board of Selectmen'
The top town officials since we were part of Plymouth Colony
Note: Much of this story will refer to the historical three-member board and its members with original term “Selectmen.” Fairhaven is now governed by a five-person body called the Select Board.
Every year in the spring, registered voters in Fairhaven go to the polls and act out a centuries old tradition by electing a member (or two) to the five-person Select Board. Until 2022, this board was made up of three members, then called the Board of Selectmen. This particular form of government is a distinctly New England institution, dating to the early days of the settling of Massachusetts.
Both the Plymouth Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony were founded by English people with deep religious convictions, so the influence of the church as local government developed was far reaching. At first, church and town leadership were one and the same. As the growing population moved out of the original settlements, people established new towns, which remained under the general rule of the colony, but were administered locally by “townsmen” or “select men,” either elected or, in some cases, appointed by the General Court. The first Massachusetts town to elect a Board of Selectmen was Dorchester in 1633.
The term “selectman” had its roots in the English church. In Anglican congregations, church members chose select-vestrymen to oversee the day-to-day operations of local churches. When the Congregational church, America’s Puritan offshoot of the Church of England, became the ruling body in Massachusetts, it adapted some of the old country’s customs to the needs of the colonies.
In Plymouth Colony, electing selectmen was not required until 1662, when a law was passed as follows: “It is enacted by the court, that in every town in this jurisdiction there shall be three or five selectmen chosen by the town out of the freemen, such as shall be approved by the court, for the better managing of the affairs of the respective townships. . . .”
When this law was passed, the township of Dartmouth, which was composed of present-day Dartmouth, Westport, New Bedford, Fairhaven, Acushnet, and some of Tiverton, had not yet incorporated. The town was formed in June, 1664, but the first selectmen were not chosen until 1667, probably because so few people actually lived here until then.
The first selectmen of Dartmouth were Arthur Hathaway, Samuel Hicks and John Russell. Hathaway, a son-in-law of John Cooke, and Hicks both lived east of the Acushnet River, the former in what’s now Acushnet and the latter at Shaw’s Cove in East Fairhaven. Russell lived in what’s now South Dartmouth. During much of the history of “Old Dartmouth,” the balance of power was often in the more heavily populated Acushnet/Fairhaven section of the township. Other early Dartmouth selectmen who lived in what’s now Fairhaven were John Cooke, Seth Pope, William Palmer and Thomas Taber.
The power of the selectmen was very nearly absolute. They were empowered to “impartially try all such cases between party and party” brought before them for the settlement of differences and debts amounting to less than 40 shillings (equal to about $1,000 today). They heard and settled disputes between the English and the Indians. They kept watch over who skipped church without having a good excuse. They placed neglected children with suitable families and made public provision for the poor. They had to see that children were properly educated by their parents.
And if all that weren’t enough, it was also the selectmen’s duty to “vigilantly watch over their neighbors’ doings.” In fact, just about every facet of civic life from the construction of streets and the licensing of taverns to the formation of the militia for the public defense was overseen by the board. Until 1715, they were entirely responsible for the articles presented to the voters at the annual Town Meetings. Then the General Court ruled that the selectmen must also accept articles on petition from ten or more property owners.
While in most communities the selectmen did their duty to promote the colony’s official church, Dartmouth’s board was rather defiant in that regard. Many of the town’s inhabitants were Quakers or Baptists who had relocated from other more strictly Puritan towns. In 1671 and again in 1674 the selectmen were reprimanded by Plymouth Court for not having collected a tax to be used to hire a minister. In October 1675, following the burning of Dartmouth homes by Native People under rule of Wampanoag sachem Metacomet (King Philip), the court in Plymouth blamed the attack on the townspeople’s failure to obtain a minister and attend regular worship. Once more the court ordered a minister be hired. These requests were ignored for years. Finally in 1722 selectmen Philip Taber and John Atkin were imprisoned in Bristol jail for 18 months for continued failure to collect the tax for the support of the minister.
In 1787, the town of New Bedford, including Acushnet and Fairhaven, was separated from Dartmouth. New Bedford’s first selectmen were John West, Isaac Pope and William Tallman. It soon became the custom that within the town, the villages of Fairhaven and Acushnet were each represented by a selectman of its own.
On February 22, 1812, Fairhaven was incorporated, including what’s now Acushnet. The first official business was to hold a Town Meeting and elect officers. On March 20, the New Bedford Mercury reported that Fairhaven had elected Stephen Tripp, James Taber and Benjamin Tripp as selectmen. (This information was long thought to be lost when Fairhaven’s records were swept out to sea during the Great Gale of 1815. No one, it seems, thought to check back issues of the newspaper.) For much of the Town of Fairhaven’s first century the Board of Selectmen was dominated by men with old Yankee family names—Taber, Delano, Tripp, Jenney.
Then in 1887, a feisty Irishman, John I. Bryant, a native of County Cork, was elected for the first time. Bryant would end up serving several terms from 1887 to 1894 and again from 1913 to 1929. In between, he served as the Assistant Superintendent of Streets under Henry H. Rogers as well as being a County Commissioner. Bryant’s twenty-four years as a selectman give him the third place rank for number of years served. (The second highest was Thomas W. Whitfield, grandson of Capt. William H. Whitfield, with twenty-seven years, from 1916 to 1944.)
Despite the local Portuguese population growing steadily from the whaling days through the 1920s, a long time passed before a person of Portuguese heritage was elected to the town’s highest office. When Thomas W. Whitfield died in office in 1944, a special election was scheduled in July. The winner of the race was Walter Silveira, an accountant with the local Ford Motor Sales Agency whose first job had been as a sweeper in the Potomska textile mill in New Bedford. Not only did Silveira break the ethnic barrier on the Board of Selectmen, he broke the record for the longest time serving in that office, nearly 44 years until his death in 1988. It may very well be a state record, too.
Three years after Walter Silveira’s era ended, another barrier was broken, when Ruth Galary became the first woman elected to the board in 1991. Mrs. Galary served one term, until April 1994.
While the Select Board’s authority over the private and moral lives of citizens is a thing of the distant past and many of the day-to-day operations of town government have been overseen by Executive Secretary Jeffrey Osuch from 1988 to 2015, followed by a series of Town Administrators, beginning with Mark Rees in 2015, this old form of government has endured here for 358 years.
It hasn’t always been a bed of roses, though. Disgusted with the Board of Selectmen in 1895, Henry H. Rogers took action. “I made a little campaign,” he told his friend Mark Twain in a letter, “and told certain people they would have to stand as officers of the town at election, because I intended to kick out everybody then in office.” He did, too.
One-hundred and twenty-six years later the smooth operation of the board ground to a halt due to the controversial and well-publicized actions of Daniel Freitas, who was serving as the board’s chairman. According to a group named Recall Dan Freitas, he “created a circus of the Select Board by abandoning meetings in anger, skipping meetings to delay decisions, and gaslighting the public to place blame for his bad behavior on other people.” According to an article published in the New Bedford Standard-Times in April 2021, the anti-Freitas group alleged “Freitas committed abusive treatment toward other Select Board members and town employees, manipulated the hiring process for the search for a new Town Administrator in order to favor an insider candidate, wasted $10,000 in taxpayer money for a recruitment screening process for the new TA position the group says he had no intention of accepting results from, committed open meeting violations by deliberating with at least one other Selectman outside of meetings, and regularly ignored and berated questions and responses from the public.” The group also cited the arrest of Freitas in 2020 for assaulting a young woman and a young man in the parking lot near McDonald’s. More than 2,500 signatures were collected asking for a recall, prompting a town-wide vote.
On July 26, 2021, Freitas was removed from office in a special election by a vote of 1,903 to 419. In the same election, Stasia Powers was elected to replace Freitas, becoming the second woman in Fairhaven history to serve on the Select Board. It’s interesting to note that 30 years earlier, Ruth Galary had replaced Daniel Freitas’s father Samuel, who had served one term on the board.
More Select Board history has occurred since then. In 2022, three people were elected to the Select Board, changing the board makeup from three members to five members. One of those elected was Leon Correy III, who became the first Black person elected to the Fairhaven Select Board. He served for one term, citing racist backlash as his reason for not seeking reelection. In 2024, Andrew Romano was the first openly gay person to be elected to the board.
Through all the historical ups and downs, it’s comforting to know that once a year we still have the power to select the leaders of our town.
Copyright © 2004, 2018, 2025 by Christopher J. Richard. All rights reserved. This is a slightly updated article first published in Fairhaven’s Monthly Navigator.
I remember Walter Silveira so well as he was a neighbor. Interesting history of this board.