New Members
By Grant Welker – Projects Reporter, Boston Business Journal
Aug 15, 2024
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Three decades after a plan first pictured a post-military future for the soon-to-close Fort Devens, the expanse northwest of Boston can now call itself home to a growing roster of notable commercial and industrial uses.
The past few years have been a leap forward for Devens, a 30-mile drive from Cambridge down Route 2 and a center of the 18-town region that makes up the Nashoba Valley Chamber of Commerce’s service area. Logistics, tech and life sciences companies have been a major driver of that growth.
Melissa Fetterhoff, the president and CEO of the Nashoba Valley chamber, said Devens’ development has “absolutely” had spillover benefits across that part of the state.
“As a regional chamber, we tend to look at things more regionally,” she said. “So if a community is going well, it has a great impact on the rest of the region as well.”
Among the newest corporate tenants are two energy companies that opened last year.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems opened a nearly 50-acre campus early last year. An MIT spinoff, the company is planning to start creating fusion energy next year as a step toward its goal of building fusion power plants. Electric Hydrogen Co., a maker of affordable green hydrogen energy, opened its first facility last year.
King Street Properties of Boston is mostly done with a five-building, $1-billion-plus biomanufacturing campus called Pathway Devens. The project includes Electric Hydrogen Co. and Azzur Cleanrooms on Demand, which opened this spring. Azzur provides 30 cleanrooms for manufacturers, taking up one of three occupied buildings in the complex. The Westborough clean energy company Ascend Elements will soon join them.
Elsewhere in Devens, the British medical device manufacturer Watson-Marlow Fluid Technology Group opened a 150,000-square-foot facility in May. One manufacturer, Avantor Fluid Handling, is building a second building that totals 154,000 square feet, and another, the Spanish company Werfen, is moving into a 232,000-square-foot building to expand its logistics footprint.
While far smaller, an expansion by Sterling Street Brewery, based in nearby Clinton, to Devens brought a public gathering space unlike anything Devens had before. The brewery opened this spring in an 8,300-square-foot Pathway Devens amenities building whose colorful, mural-adorned facade pops in an otherwise industrial streetscape.
Major private-industry employers aren’t new to Devens, which retains some military operations as well as housing. Bristol Myers Squibb opened a huge facility there in 2009, and the hydroponic leafy green grower Little Leaf Farms began operations in 2015 before multiple expansions.
Few Massachusetts communities are known for quick and easy permitting approvals. But Devens, which opened during World War I and today spans the towns of Ayer, Harvard and Shirley, is run by MassDevelopment. The state agency touts its existing zoning and streamlining permitting.
Fetterhoff said the Nashoba Valley chamber describes Devens as an easy secondary site for firms in places like Boston or Cambridge.
“When we’ve had the opportunity to pitch it,” she said, “we say it’s a great place to work and live.”
