A town of 20,000 in Briston County, Norton has long been on the sporting map as the home of TPC Boston, hosting the Dell Technologies Championship up to 2019. The village of Norton Center, where you’ll find the town’s civic institutions,...
This outlying eastern suburb of Springfield is bordered to the north by the Chicopee River. In times past, the northern part of the town was industrialized, while the southern end was agrarian. Now Wilbraham is mostly residential,...
On the Upper Cape, Sandwich is an historic town facing Cape Cod Bay and first settled in 1637. From the 1820s, Sandwich established a reputation as New England’s premier glassmaking center, and this history is presented in vivid...
At the very base of Cape Cod, Bourne is a town composed of seven villages on either side of the Cape Cod Canal. For visitors, everything in Bourne gravitates towards this great waterway, opened in 1914. You can walk or ride a bike...
South of Worcester, Auburn is a town of 17,000 incorporated as “Ward” in 1778. This name didn’t stick as it was too similar to the nearby town of Ware, so the new name of Auburn was chosen in 1837. Auburn has a special place...
Right in Massachusetts’ cranberry country, Lakeville is a town with almost a fifth of its area taken up by water. As well as dozens of cranberry bogs, Lakeville is home to Assawompset Pond, the largest natural lake in Massachusetts. The...
West of Plymouth, this bucolic town in Southeastern Massachusetts is in a swampy landscape. In fact, 50% of Carver’s area is made up of wetlands. From the 18th century, this made the town a prime spot for bog iron, dredged from the...
A rural suburban town of almost 12,000, Norfolk is on the southwestern edge of the Boston metropolitan area, in an upper valley of the Charles River. The early History of Norfolk circles around a religious dispute in the 18th century,...
This lively town northeast of Worcester was founded in the mid-19th century by two brothers in the carPet making industry. Half a century later, Clinton’s landscape changed forever when the Nashua River was dammed to form the 7-square-mile...
On just seven square miles, this town east of Brockton is one of the smallest by area in Massachusetts. Known for its shoemaking trade in the 19th and early 20th century, Whitman got its name from a local philanthropist in the 1880s,...
A residential community in Plymouth County, East Bridgewater has many of the signatures of a Southeastern Massachusetts Town, with cranberry bogs and dairy and fruit farms. In 1649, Sachem Rock in East Bridgewater was the site of a...
A residential western suburb of Boston, Weston is loved for its rural character, with more than 2,000 acres set aside as conservation land and public parks. The town’s civic center grew up in the 18th century on the Boston Post Road,...
East of Fitchburg in Worcester County, Lunenburg is a town of 12,000 with a distinct rural character and huge swaths of conservation land to discover. The town was incorporated in 1728, and was largely untouched by the Industrial Revolution,...
Across the harbor from the old whaling port of New Bedford, Fairhaven is a seaside town with an assortment of grand turn-of-the-century public buildings. These landmarks, including schools, the Town Hall and the Millicent Library,...
On the South Shore, about 25 miles south of Boston, Pembroke is a town on the North River, abounding with water, at marshes, brooks and a patchwork of large natural ponds. Every spring, alewife herring migrate through the town, from...
An upscale community on the South Shore, Duxbury’s is a town that made a name for itself at the end of the Age of Sail in the early 19th century. Duxbury has a stunning public beach park, on a long crescent of sand that curves out...
This South Shore town was incorporated some 300 years ago, and has a sedate old center with a house built by one of the town’s first European families. Now, the Stetson House (c. 1700) is a museum owned by the Hanover Historical...
In the first half of the 19th century, this town in the Blackstone Valley was the overnight stopping point on the Blackstone Canal. That waterway was completed in 1824 and provided a crucial shipping highway between Worcester and Providence,...
Close to Lexington and Concord, this small town in Greater Boston participated in the first exchanges of the American Revolutionary War on April 19 1775. Bedford is at the terminus of the Minuteman Commuter Bikeway, a 10-mile rail...
Thirty miles off the coast of Massachusetts, Nantucket is an island that conjures many associations, from affluence to shipwrecks. For decades up to the mid-19th century, this was the whaling capital of the world, an industry driven...
Near the head of the Blackstone River Valley, this town was first settled by Europeans in the 18th century. The modern story of Millbury really begins a century later with the Industrial Revolution. At that time a rash of textile mills...