Woburn, Massachusetts
A Short History of Woburn
From a Puritan farm town carved out of Charlestown, to the birthplace of a count and a famous apple, to a tannery city whose poisoned wells changed environmental law in America.
Settlement and Founding
The land that became Woburn was home to the Massachusett people before English settlers arrived. In 1640 families from Charlestown, led by Captain Edward Johnson, founded the inland farming town, and in 1642 it was incorporated and named for Woburn in Bedfordshire, England. For its first two centuries Woburn was a community of farms and small mills strung along the Aberjona River.
Count Rumford and the Baldwin Apple
Two of early Woburn’s sons left a long shadow. Benjamin Thompson, born here in 1753, became a scientist and inventor, was knighted, and took the title Count Rumford; his birthplace still stands on Elm Street. Loammi Baldwin, an engineer who helped build the Middlesex Canal, gave his name to the Baldwin apple, long one of New England’s most important crops. A downtown marker still records that both men grew up in Woburn.
The Leather City
In the nineteenth century Woburn became a center of leather tanning and shoemaking, drawing immigrant workers and incorporating as a city in 1888. The tanneries built fortunes and a dense, diverse downtown, but they also left a chemical legacy in the soil and groundwater that the city would confront a century later.
A Civil Action
In the 1970s, families in East Woburn noticed something terrible: an unusual number of children were being diagnosed with leukemia. Residents traced their fear to two municipal wells, G and H, that drew water tainted with industrial solvents from nearby properties. Their lawsuit against W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods became one of the most famous toxic-tort cases in American history, told in the best-selling book and the film A Civil Action. The case helped drive the federal cleanup of the Industri-Plex site and made Woburn a permanent reference point in environmental and public-health law. It is also a lesson in civic power: ordinary residents, organized as For a Cleaner Environment, forced some of the largest companies in the country to answer.
Modern Woburn
Today Woburn is a commercial hub where Interstates 93 and 95 meet, lined with office parks, hotels, and the Burlington-Woburn retail corridor, while its old neighborhoods around Horn Pond and the common keep their village feel. The cleaned-up Industri-Plex land now holds a transit station and commerce, and the Tri-Community Greenway runs where rail lines once did. The city that learned to fight for its water has spent the years since investing in its schools, its parks, and a downtown that still centers on the 1640 common.
Sources: City of Woburn; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Wells G&H Superfund site; U.S. Census Bureau.