Norwood, Massachusetts
A Short History of Norwood
From a farming corner of South Dedham, to a printing and leather town wired with its own electric plant, to the busy suburb of today, named, it turns out, after a novel.
South Dedham, Before 1872
For two centuries the land that is now Norwood was the southern edge of Dedham, a stretch of farms and a small village along the road to Providence. One of its farmers became a local legend: Captain Aaron Guild, who on April 19, 1775 left his plow in the furrow, rode to Lexington, and arrived in time to fire on the retreating British. Guild and his oxen still appear on the town seal. By the 1800s the village had grown enough to want a government of its own.
A Town of Its Own
On February 23, 1872, Governor William B. Washburn signed the act that carved a new town out of South Dedham and a slice of Walpole. Residents had gathered weeks earlier to pick a name, and they chose Norwood, taken from a popular novel by the preacher Henry Ward Beecher, “Norwood; or, Village Life in New England.” Only later did the town learn there was also a Norwood in England, not far from the English Dedham the region was named for.
Leather, Ink, and Books
Norwood grew into a factory town. The Winslow tanneries, which traced their roots to the era of the Revolution, turned sheepskin into leather, while printing-ink works and railroad repair shops lined the tracks. Above all, Norwood became a printing center: the Norwood Press expanded along Washington Street in the 1890s and produced books and periodicals on a large scale, so that volumes read across the country carried the name of this small town on their spines.
The Town That Ran Its Own Wires
Norwood made an unusual choice that still defines it. In 1907 the town built its own electric light plant rather than buy power from a private company, and it has run its own utility ever since. Generations later Norwood extended the same idea to the digital age, wiring homes with a town-owned fiber network, Norwood Light Broadband. Few communities in America can say their power company and their internet provider are the local government itself.
A Town of Artists and Arrivals
Norwood also produced Fred Holland Day, a daring photographer and publisher born here in 1864, who became the first American to publish Oscar Wilde and a leading figure in art photography. His boyhood home on Day Street is now the Norwood Historical Society. Through the twentieth century waves of Irish, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Syrian and Lebanese families settled around the factories, and newer arrivals keep coming, which is why so many languages are spoken in Norwood today.
Modern Norwood
Today Norwood is a densely built suburb of about 31,600 people, still governed the old New England way by Town Meeting and a Board of Selectmen, still lit by its own electric department, and still anchored by a downtown with two commuter rail stops that carry residents into Boston. It has grown into a small city in everything but name, while keeping the town-scale democracy it chose in 1872.
Sources: Town of Norwood; Norwood Historical Society; Encyclopaedia Britannica; U.S. Census Bureau.