In 1901, Richard H. Long of Weymouth bought a four-story empty factory building on the corner of Waverley and Mellen streets because he needed more space to accommodate his shoe manufacturing business. That space sufficed for eight years when Long built an even bigger factory on the north side of the railroad tracks near Fountain Street. This was just the beginning of R.H. Long’s career in Framingham.During World War I, Long retooled his factories to manufacture leather products for the army. To accommodate the extra workers needed, he bought the Kendall Hotel. He was involved in …

Old Connecticut Path is older than Framingham and the state of Connecticut! It was the trail blazed by Native Americans to get to the Connecticut River Valley from the sea, long before Europeans arrived.  Connecticut is the English pronunciation of a Native American word meaning “beside the long river." The Nipmuck People who lived in the area that would become Framingham used the path as a trade route. It was along this path that Native Americans brought corn to Massachusetts Bay Colony settlers in the lean winter of 1630. By the seventeenth century a combination of war with Abenaki Tribes …

In 1647 John and Anna Stone established a homestead along the Sudbury River near the falls in North Framingham. They build a gristmill and thus began a family dynasty that would last for seven generations. A hurricane in 1798 destroyed the last of the Stones’ mills.Following the invention of the cotton gin, textile production became an emerging industry in New England. Cotton quickly expanded to woolens. In 1822 a group of investors bought the mill site at the falls in Framingham and constructed a new mill. The fleece of Saxon sheep was to provide the raw material so the business was …

In the coming months Framingham will be observing the Sesquicentennial (150th) anniversary of the Civil War. In April of 1961, Confederate soldiers fired the first shots of the Civil War on Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Reaction was immediate. Both the individual citizens and the government of Framingham moved quickly to defend the Union.George Stevens of Framingham joined the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteer Militia. The “Sixth” was ordered to Washington, which was surrounded by prosecession slave states. Traveling by train required the unit to go through Baltimore, …

Some 10,000 years ago, glaciers carved the kettle holes, ridges and wetlands that cover a 30-acre parcel of land in northeast Framingham. Will Curtis was a landscape designer and horticulturist, who stumbled across this area in the fall of 1930. At that time, nearby Nobscot village was quite rural. There was a chapel, a district school, the tiny combination post office and library surrounded by cultivated fields and apple orchards.  Curtis bought the land, and with his partner Howard Stiles filled their woodlands with native plants. They experimented with wild flowers and gardening techniques…

In 1915, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company paid more than $4 million in claims, due to tuberculosis. In an effort to improve treatment and prevention, they offered $100,000 to the National Association for the Study and Prevention of TB to conduct a coordinated community experiment to demonstrate if TB could be controlled with improved sanitation, public awareness and early detection.MetLife stipulated the size and location of the town and Framingham was one of many communities that met the criteria. Additional factors in Framingham’s favor included proximity to Boston, well-trained …

The story goes that two unscrupulous colonists swindled 1,700 acres of land from the Natick Indians around 1682 and sold it off at a tidy profit. Among the buyers was the Pratt family whose holdings extended across a flat area that became known as Pratt’s Plain. About 200 years later, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts decided that flat plain would be a great site for the states’ military encampments and training grounds. One hundred twenty four acres were purchased and dubbed Musterfield. State militias were obliged to spend five days a year training. The infantry brigades went to Framingham…

The trouble in Salem started in 1692 with two young girls listening to Voodoo tales from a Caribbean born slave named Titiba. Soon Salem was in a panic about witches living among them tormenting and victimizing the innocent.  Witchcraft was a capital offense, and before the wheels of Puritan justice ground to a halt 20 people from Salem Village had been executed and hundreds accused, imprisoned and subjected to cruel  punishment. Among the victims were several members of the extended family of John Towne.Although he was powerless to offer any direct assistance, the family had an influential …

After almost a decade, the Main Street Bridge is open again. The original bridge was built in 1848 and completed in less than eight months! Main Street and the Old Burial Ground on the west side of the River are much older. Here is the story.By 1693, the inhabitants of the land area that would become the Town of Framingham petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for a charter to incorporate the town and form a local government. The first attempts failed. For one thing Thomas Danforth, an early settler of Framingham, owned large tracts of land for which he had great plans. Rather than sell …