Brookline, Massachusetts
A Short History of Brookline
From a Muddy River farming hamlet of Boston, to the town that famously refused to be annexed, to the birthplace of a president and the home of America’s greatest landscape architect.
Before the Town
The land between the Muddy River and the Charles was home to the Massachusett people long before any English settlement, a place of fields and fishing weirs. English colonists from Boston began farming the area in the 1630s, and for decades it was simply the rural “Muddy River hamlet,” an outlying piece of Boston where the city’s wealthier families kept farms and country estates.
A Town of Its Own
In 1705 the hamlet won the right to govern itself and was incorporated as the town of Brookline, a name drawn from a brook that marked a property line on Judge Samuel Sewall’s estate. From the start it governed itself in the classic New England way, through town meeting, a tradition Brookline has never given up.
The Town That Said No
In the second half of the 1800s Boston grew by swallowing its neighbors, annexing Roxbury, Dorchester, West Roxbury, and more. Brookline stood directly in the path. In 1873 the question went to the voters, and Brookline said no, choosing to remain an independent town even as Boston closed around it on three sides. That single vote is why Brookline is still its own town today, with its own schools, police, and government, rather than a Boston neighborhood.
Olmsted and the Emerald Necklace
In 1883 Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York’s Central Park, moved his home and design office to Brookline, to an estate he called Fairsted. From there he and his firm laid out parks across the country and shaped Boston’s Emerald Necklace, the chain of green spaces that still threads through the region. Fairsted is now a national historic site where you can see how the parks you use were drawn.
A President Is Born
On May 29, 1917, in a modest house at 83 Beals Street, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born. The future president spent his early childhood in Brookline before the family moved away. The house is now the John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site, preserved much as it was, a reminder that national history can begin on an ordinary residential street.
Modern Brookline
The streetcar and the trolley turned Brookline into one of the country’s first commuter suburbs, filling Coolidge Corner and Washington Square with apartment blocks and shops. Today it is a dense, diverse, and highly educated town of more than 60,000, home to a large Jewish community and to immigrants from around the world. It still governs itself by Town Meeting, still wrestles with how to stay affordable, and still guards the independence its voters chose in 1873.
Sources: Town of Brookline; Brookline Historical Society; National Park Service; U.S. Census Bureau.