Norton, Massachusetts
A Short History of Norton
A settlement that petitioned its way out of Taunton in 1711, a college founded as a father’s memorial in 1834, and a reservoir the town waited a century to own.
1711, and the North Precinct That Left
Norton did not begin as a town. It began as the northern reach of Taunton, land opened to settlement after the Taunton North Purchase of 1668, with the first settlers arriving around 1669. The families out there faced the standard colonial arithmetic: the meetinghouse was in Taunton, the road was long, and a Sunday service or a town vote cost a day. So they did what dozens of Massachusetts settlements did, and petitioned for a church and a government of their own. In 1711 the settlement was set off and incorporated as the Town of Norton. That is the pattern for most of eastern Massachusetts: a town is usually a piece of an older town that grew big enough to want its own vote.
A College Built as a Memorial
In 1834 Eliza Wheaton Strong, the daughter of Judge Laban Wheaton, died at thirty-nine. Her sister-in-law persuaded the grieving judge to build something that would outlast a gravestone: a school for young women, in the center of Norton, at a time when almost no institution in the country would educate them seriously. Wheaton Female Seminary opened with a curriculum shaped by Mary Lyon, one of the era’s great advocates for women’s education, and it was built to match the men’s schools in science, mathematics, philosophy and rhetoric rather than to imitate a finishing school. The seminary was chartered as Wheaton College in 1912, admitted men in 1988, and still anchors the center of town. Its founding is worth a student’s attention for one reason above the rest: it was an argument, made in brick, that education belongs to everyone.
The Reservoir the Town Finally Bought
The Norton Reservoir is not a natural lake. It was created in the 1860s when the Rumford River was dammed to power a private mill, which meant that for more than a century one of the largest bodies of water in town belonged to whoever owned the dam. Residents asked the owners to sell, and kept asking, and kept getting nowhere. In 1986 the town stopped asking and used the machinery this guide describes: it voted, putting $2.1 million on the table to buy the reservoir outright. More than 500 acres of it now sit under the Norton Conservation Commission, which means the water belongs to the public, permanently. It is the cleanest local example of what a town vote can actually do.
The Town on the Map Today
Norton today is a town of about 19,202 people with two historic place names still in daily use: Norton Center, the village around the common where the Municipal Center, the library and Wheaton College stand, and Chartley, on the town’s western side. The Norton Center Historic District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The town also spent years on national television every Labor Day weekend: TPC Boston, the tournament golf course in Norton, hosted a PGA Tour event, the Deutsche Bank Championship and later the Dell Technologies Championship, through 2018.
The History the Town Keeps Itself
The Norton Historical Society holds the town’s photographs, newspapers and artifacts and runs a museum in the Old School House at 18 West Main Street, a building that is itself an exhibit. It offers public programs, events and tours, and like every organization on the non-profits page, it runs on volunteers, which means a student with an interest in the town’s past can walk in and become part of keeping it.
Sources: Wikipedia and Britannica, Norton, Massachusetts (settlement and incorporation); Wheaton College, Brief History of Wheaton College (collegehistory.wheatoncollege.edu); Town of Norton hub hook, Norton Reservoir purchase; Norton Historical Society (nortonhistoricalsociety.org); U.S. Census Bureau.