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, is right next to the 500-acre campus of Wheaton College, rightly considered one of …
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, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of farms around, where you can pick your own fruit, …
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 detail at the Sandwich Glass Museum, where you can watch live demonstrations in front of the furnace. …
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 along the banks, catch a train across the magnificent Cape Cod Canal …
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 in modern history, as it was here that the engineer and …
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 pond is part of a massive complex, serving as a drinking water supply for New …
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 ponds and forged at iron works. When that industry went into decline, 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, causing congregation members to leave Wrentham and settle in North Wrentham. By the Civil War, …
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 Wachusett Reservoir, the largest of its kind in the world at the time. You can walk along …
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, shortly after being made a township. Dairy farming has also been a way …