Needham, Massachusetts
A Short History of Needham
From a tract bought from the Massachusett leader Nehoiden, to a knitting town that made the country’s baby clothes, to the day half the town broke away and became Wellesley.
Nehoiden’s Land
Before there was a town here, this was Massachusett homeland. In 1680 English colonists bought the tract that became Needham from the Massachusett leader Nehoiden, paying ten pounds, forty acres of land, and forty shillings worth of corn for a piece of ground roughly four miles by five. The land sat inside the older town of Dedham, and for a generation the families who settled it had to travel back across the Charles for town meetings and Sunday worship, which is exactly the inconvenience that led them to want a town of their own.
Breaking From Dedham, 1711
In 1711 the settlement broke off from Dedham and was incorporated as its own town, taking the name Needham after Needham Market, a town in Suffolk, England. Early Needham was farmland and scattered mills, governed the New England way by a town meeting where property-owning men gathered to vote the budget and choose their officers. That basic form, residents deciding town business face to face, still runs Needham today, though it is now done through elected representatives.
A Knitting Town
In the 1800s, knitters displaced from the English Midlands settled in Needham and turned it into a maker of knit goods: underwear, hats, and shoes. The most famous of them was William Carter, who started a knitting mill in Needham Heights in 1865. That small shop grew into Carter’s, one of the largest children’s clothing makers in the country, and it stayed a family business here until the Carters sold it in 1990. For more than a century, if an American baby wore it, there was a good chance it began in Needham.
Losing the West, 1881
Needham was once nearly twice its present size. By the late 1800s the neighborhoods on the far side of the Charles River had grown wealthier and more distinct, and in 1881 they voted to secede and form a separate town, which they named Wellesley. Needham was left close to the boundaries it has now, a smaller town wrapped on three sides by the river. It is one of the clearest lessons in local power the town offers: a community that decides it wants its own government can, under Massachusetts law, go get one.
Suburb on the Charles
The railroad and then the highways pulled Needham into Boston’s orbit, and through the 20th century it filled in as a residential suburb known for its schools. Along Interstate 95, the town protected Cutler Park Reservation, which guards the largest freshwater marsh on the middle Charles. More recently the old industrial edge near Kendrick Street was remade into an innovation district of technology and life-science companies, giving the town a commercial tax base to go with its neighborhoods.
Modern Needham
Today Needham is one of the most educated and highest-income towns in the state, still governed the old New England way by a Representative Town Meeting, an elected Select Board, and an appointed Town Manager. It faces the pressures common to desirable suburbs: the cost of housing, the strain of new development, and the work of staying open to families who were long priced out. The history that started with a purchase from Nehoiden is still being written, and residents who show up help write it.
Sources: Town of Needham; Needham History Center and Museum; Mass.gov; U.S. Census Bureau.