[3] Leicester was incorporated by a vote of the Massachusetts General Court on February 15, 1713,[4] on the condition that the land be settled by 50 families within seven years.

[5] Upon the grant of the General Court, the proprietors immediately set about meeting the condition of the town's incorporation.

These districts had most of the powers of a town except that they shared a representative in the General Court with Leicester until the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775.

Although no significant battles of the American Revolution were fought in the area, Leicester citizens played a large role in the conflict's start.

At a Committee of Safety meeting in 1774, Leicester's Colonel William Henshaw declared that "we must have companies of men ready to march upon a minute's notice"—coining the term "minutemen", a nickname for the rapid-response militia members who fought in the revolution's first battles.

Henshaw would later become an adjutant general to Artemas Ward, who was second in command to George Washington in the Continental Army.

This information can be found in books held on reserve in the Leicester Public Library[citation needed].

They marched quickly to join with other Minutemen on April 19, 1775, to fight at the first conflict between Massachusetts residents and British troops, the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

A few months later on June 17, 1775, a freed slave and Leicester resident named Peter Salem fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill, where he killed British Major John Pitcairn.

As early as the 1780s, Leicester's mills churned out one-third of American hand cards, which were tools for straightening fibers before spinning thread and weaving cloth.

By the 1890s when Leicester industry began to fade, the town was producing one-third of all hand and machine cards in North America.

Ruth Henshaw Bascom (1772–1848), the wife of Reverend Ezekial Lysander Bascom and daughter of Colonel William Henshaw and Phebe Swan, became America's premier portrait folk artist and pastelist, producing over one thousand portraits from 1789 to 1846.

Ebenezer Adams, who would later be the first mathematics and natural philosophy professor at the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, was the academic preceptor in Leicester in 1792.

Leicester today is one of the northernmost communities within the Blackstone River Valley, National Heritage Corridor.

Other social leaders who came from Leicester include Charles Adams, military officer and foreign minister, born in town;[7] Emory Washburn, Harvard Law professor and governor of Massachusetts from 1854–1855; and Samuel May, a pastor and active abolitionist in the 1860s, whose house was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

In 2005, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette named Leicester one of Central Massachusetts' top ten sports towns.

Cherry Valley and Rochdale have separate ZIP codes from the rest of the town (01611 and 01542, respectively), but otherwise the village boundaries have no official significance, although some Cherry Valley, Rochdale, and Leicester have three separate and distinct water districts and four sewer districts.

Other municipalities bordering Leicester include Paxton along Route 56 to the north, Worcester and Auburn on the east, and Oxford and Charlton on the south.