Wellesley, Massachusetts
A Short History of Wellesley
Wellesley was assembled out of other towns, named after a rich man’s lake, and given a college before it was even a town. That order of events explains more about the place than any map will.
West of Needham
Before there was a Wellesley there was West Needham. The land began as part of colonial Dedham, then became the western half of Needham, and for generations the people who lived here were the far side of somebody else’s town. Their taxes went east, their town meetings happened east, and the distance wore on them.
The Breakaway
In 1880 the residents of West Needham voted to break away, and on April 6, 1881 the Massachusetts legislature incorporated the separate town of Wellesley. A new town needs a name, and this one came from private property: the Lake Waban estate of banker and railroad financier Horatio Hollis Hunnewell, who had named the grounds for the family of his wife, Isabella Welles. The town, in effect, named itself after the estate.
A College Before the Town
Wellesley College is older than Wellesley. Henry Fowle Durant founded the college for women in 1875, six years before the town itself was incorporated, so the first students walked a campus in what was still, legally, Needham. The college gave the new town a national name from the day it was born.
The Gardens on Lake Waban
Hunnewell, whose estate gave the town its name, was a devoted horticulturist. Along Lake Waban he built an Italianate topiary garden, trees sculpted into architectural shapes in the old European style, and his descendants still maintain it today. It is one of the odder and lovelier inheritances a Massachusetts town has.
A Second Campus
In 1919 Roger Babson founded Babson College in Wellesley, giving the town a second nationally known campus. A town of modest size ended up with two names recognized far beyond Massachusetts, and both arrived through the ambitions of individual founders rather than any town plan.
Wellesley Today
The town that voted itself into existence still governs itself with unusual seriousness. A representative Town Meeting of 240 members, elected by precinct, votes the budget every spring, and the open spaces along Morses Pond, Lake Waban, and the Charles River remain protected town land. The habit that founded Wellesley, deciding its own affairs at its own meeting, is still how the place runs.
Sources: Town of Wellesley, History of Wellesley; Wikipedia, Wellesley, Massachusetts; Wikipedia, Babson College.