Marlborough, Massachusetts
A Short History of Marlborough
From a Native planting ground and a colonial frontier town burned in war, to a city that shod the nation, to the corporate headquarters that line its highways today.
Before the Town
Before any English town existed, the land was Okommakamesit, a Native planting ground of roughly six thousand acres. In 1654 it became one of the Commonwealth’s “praying towns,” part of the missionary work of the Reverend John Eliot of Roxbury, where Native residents lived under colonial and Christian rule. When English settlers from Sudbury petitioned for the same land, the two communities ended up sharing it uneasily.
A Frontier Town, Founded and Burned
Marlborough was incorporated as a town in 1660 and named for Marlborough, a market town in Wiltshire, England. It sat on the western frontier of the colony, and that location nearly ended it. During King Philip’s War, in the spring of 1676, the settlement was attacked and much of it burned. The Native residents of Okommakamesit were forcibly removed to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where many died of cold and hunger, and English settlers took over their land. Marlborough was rebuilt, but the war left a permanent mark on the town and the people who had lived there first.
The City That Made Shoes
In the nineteenth century Marlborough became one of the great shoe-making towns of New England. The trade took hold in the 1830s and grew until, by the 1880s, the city held more than two dozen shoe and boot companies. John A. Frye founded his boot company here in 1863, and Frye boots became the oldest continuously operated shoe brand in the country. Rice and Hutchins built a large factory in 1871. The factories drew thousands of workers, including waves of immigrants, and shoes made Marlborough rich enough to leave town-meeting government behind.
Becoming a City
Marlborough incorporated as a city in 1890, trading the town meeting for an elected mayor and council. The change came at the height of the shoe boom, but the boom did not last. The Great Shoe Strike of 1898 and 1899 shook the industry, and over the next decades shoe manufacturing slowly left the city, as it left much of Massachusetts, for cheaper labor elsewhere.
Highways and Headquarters
The modern city was built by its highways. When Interstates 495 and 290 met Route 20 at the edge of Marlborough, the corridor filled with corporate campuses. Today three major companies keep their headquarters in the city: Boston Scientific, the medical-device maker; Hologic, a women’s-health technology firm; and BJ’s Wholesale Club. Quest Diagnostics and Raytheon run large operations here as well. The mall at Solomon Pond opened in 1996 on the city’s northern edge, a landmark of the era when retail, not shoes, defined the local economy.
Marlborough Today
The city that immigrants once filled to make shoes is an immigrant city again. Nearly a third of residents were born abroad, and Marlborough is home to one of the larger Brazilian communities in Massachusetts and a fast-growing Latino population, their businesses and churches now a fixture of Main Street. Marlborough has also sent its share of people into the wider world, among them John Rock, the physician who helped develop the first birth-control pill, and the actress Marcia Cross.
Sources: City of Marlborough; Marlborough Historical Society; U.S. Census Bureau; company reports.