Milton, Massachusetts
A Short History of Milton
From Unquity, a settlement at the falls of the Neponset that broke away from Dorchester, to the first chocolate mill in the colonies, to the room where Suffolk County put its defiance of the Crown in writing a year before Lexington.
Unquity Becomes Milton
Milton began as Unquity, the name early records give the land along the Neponset River south of Dorchester. On June 11, 1662, its inhabitants won permission from the Massachusetts General Court to separate from Dorchester and incorporate as their own town. That is the founding habit: the town’s first act was persuading a legislature to let it govern itself, and it has been governing itself by town meeting ever since.
Chocolate at the Falls
In 1764, at the falls of the Neponset, the Walter Baker Chocolate Company began grinding cocoa in what was the first chocolate mill in the American colonies. The falls had already made Milton a working river town, and the chocolate works kept going for roughly two hundred years in Milton and Dorchester, long enough that generations on both banks grew up with the smell of roasting cocoa in the air.
The Suffolk Resolves
In September 1774, delegates from across Suffolk County met in Milton and adopted the Suffolk Resolves, an early, organized refusal to submit to British rule. The Resolves were carried to Philadelphia and helped shape the Continental Congress’s response to Parliament. Lexington and Concord were still seven months away. Milton had put the argument on paper first. The Suffolk Resolves House, where the delegates voted, still stands in town today as the headquarters of the Milton Historical Society.
The China Trade Comes Ashore
In 1833 Robert Bennet Forbes, a sea captain and merchant who made his fortune in the China Trade, built a Greek Revival mansion on a Milton hilltop. The house is preserved today as the Forbes House Museum, and it is a reminder that this quiet town on the Neponset was once wired directly into commerce on the far side of the world.
Saving the Blue Hills
In 1893 the Metropolitan Parks Commission purchased the Blue Hills Reservation, much of which lies within Milton, as one of the first lands in the state set aside for public recreation. That decision, made when public parks were still a new idea, is why a town bordering Boston still has a granite ridge of hiking trails on its southern edge that belongs to everyone.
Milton Today
Modern Milton is a town of 28,630 people that borders a major city and still governs itself the way it did in 1662, scaled up: 279 Town Meeting members elected from ten precincts vote the budget every spring. The Neponset that once turned mill wheels now draws walkers and paddlers, the Blue Hills draw hikers, and the town’s oldest habit, deciding its own affairs in public, is open to anyone who shows up.
Sources: Town of Milton; Milton Historical Society; Forbes House Museum; U.S. Census Bureau.