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town in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States
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Milton is a town in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States and an immediate southern suburb of Boston. The population was 28,630 at the 2020 census.
Milton is located in the relatively hilly area between the Neponset River and Blue Hills, bounded by Brush Hill to the west, Milton Hill to the east, Blue Hills to the south and the Neponset River to the north. It is also bordered by Boston's Dorchester and Mattapan district to the north and its Hyde Park district to the west, with the neighboring Massachusetts city of Quincy to the east and the towns of Randolph to the south, and Canton to the west.
The area now known as Milton was inhabited for more than ten thousand years prior to European colonization. The Paleo-Indian archaeological site Fowl Meadows lies within the bounds of present-day Milton, with charcoal remains dated to 10,210±60 years before present in 1994, later calibrated to 12,140 years before present.
At the time of European exploration and settlement in the early 1600s, the area was inhabited by the Neponset tribe of the Massachusett, an Algonquian people, who referred to the area that would become Milton as 'Unquatiquisset,' meaning 'Lower Falls', denoting the place where the rapids of the Neponset River meet Massachusetts Bay.
According to local traditions and 19th-century accounts, several Native American graves and ceremonial pits may have been uncovered during construction along Canton Avenue in Milton. These discoveries, which were reported in local newsletters and oral histories, are believed to have belonged to members of the Ponkapoag tribe, who historically inhabited the area. Graves found during roadwork were said to have been oriented east to west, potentially reflecting cultural or religious practices of the tribe. Nearby pits, possibly used for cooking or religious ceremonies, were also reported, and evidence of long-term use, such as fire-scorched rocks and charcoal, was observed.
The namesake of the Massachusett people was the indigenous name for the Great Blue Hill, Massachusett, meaning 'at the great hill'. The hills had a religious significance to the Massachusett, who extensively mined rhyolite to make weaponry thought to be imbued with divine strength from the sacred hills.
Local residents have also shared anecdotal reports of finding arrowheads and other Native American artifacts in the area throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, further corroborating the area’s long-standing significance to Indigenous peoples.
The Ponkapoag tribe largely resided in the surrounding areas, including Canton and Stoughton, though some members, such as Mingo and his descendants, are recorded as having lived in Milton well into the 18th century.
The area that became Milton began to be sparsely settled by English colonists in the late 1620s and early 1630s as a part of Dorchester, formally established as an organized settlement in 1640 by Puritans from England. Richard Collicott, one of the first English settlers, built a trading post near the Neponset River, and negotiated the purchase of Milton from Sachem Cutshamekin. John Eliot, an English missionary, published a Massachusett translation of the Bible in 1640, facilitating rapid conversion of indigenous inhabitants to convert to Christianity and assimilate to the ideologies and culture of the colonists.
Many of the initial English settlers arrived during the 1650s, fleeing the aftermath of Oliver Cromwell's deposition from power and the English Civil War.
Several early Puritan families of Milton would later become influential in the culture and politics of Massachusetts Bay Colony, including the Sumners, Houghtons, Hutchinsons, Stoughtons, Tuckers, Voses, Glovers, and Babcocks. The original name for the area, translated to "Lower Falls" was adapted as "Lower Mills" after the establishment of Israel Stoughton's Grist Mill in 1634, the earliest mill in the United States. Furthermore, in 1640, English settlers began shipbuilding at Gulliver's Creek, a tributary of the Neponset, using the innumerable quantity of Eastern white pines found in early Milton's dense forests.
In 1662, "that part of the Town of Dorchester which is situated on the south side of the Neponset River commonly called 'Unquatiquisset' was incorporated as an independent town and named Milton in honor of Milton Abbey, Dorset, England."
After incorporation, the population continued to increase during the late 17th century in the wake of King Philip’s War which had devastated much of New England. The town was unscathed by the war due to several factors including the strategic location between hills, proximity to the well fortified capital Boston and most notably, the effective decimation of the indigenous inhabitants of the area by the 1660s as a result of disease and violent encroachment by colonists and the pacification of surviving Massachusett via mass conversions to Christianity and relocation to praying towns. Those who did resist were swiftly executed or sent to the West Indies as slaves. By the 1670s, the threat of violent resistance from the Massachusett was effectively eliminated, affording the developing town comparative safety and consequent prosperity compared to other regions of New England. As a result of this, colonists fleeing the villages and towns destroyed in the war settled in the town, establishing farms and nascent industries. This wave of migration from the rest of the colony marked the settlement of several prominent families in the town. For example, Ralph Houghton, a Puritan from England who had helped establish the town of Lancaster fled to Milton with his family after Lancaster was destroyed by the indigenous Nashua people who razed the town and massacred almost every inhabitant during the war. The Houghton family would later become prominent not just in Milton, but Massachusetts as a whole.
A powder mill established in 1674 may have been the earliest powder mill in the colonies, taking advantage of the town's water power sites. Boston investors, seeing the potential of the town and its proximity to the city, provided the capital to develop 18th-century Milton as an industrial area, including an iron slitting mill and sawmills, and the first chocolate factory in New England (the Walter Baker Chocolate Factory) in 1764, which was converted from the old Stoughton Grist Mill. Through the efforts of Daniel Henchman the first paper mill to appear in New England was at Milton on the Neponset River in 1729. From its earliest days, Milton's favorable location at the rapids of the Neponset River made it one of the earliest and most active industrial areas in the United States.
The Suffolk Resolves, one of the earliest attempts at negotiations by the American colonists with the British Empire were signed in Milton in 1774, and were used as a model by the drafters of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The Suffolk Resolves House, where the Resolves were passed, still stands and it is maintained as the headquarters of the Milton Historical Society. At the time of the Resolves it was owned by Capt. Daniel Vose, a well-known businessman, and later a representative to the Provincial Congress. The house was moved to a new location at 1370 Canton Avenue in Western Milton in order to save it from demolition at its previous location in "Milton Village" at Lower Mills. They were the "Suffolk Resolves" because Milton was part of Suffolk County until 1793, when Norfolk County split off, leaving only Boston and Chelsea in Suffolk County.
Milton became an active site for important power players in colonial Massachusetts. John Hancock purchased a large hill, today called Hancock Hill, in the Blue Hills Reservation and planted orchards as well as harvested wild blueberries which grow abundantly at the summit. Two royal governors of Massachusetts, Jonathan Belcher and Thomas Hutchinson, had houses in Milton. The Governor Belcher House dates from 1777, replacing the earlier home destroyed by a fire in 1776, and it is privately owned on Governor Belcher Lane in East Milton.
Thomas Hutchinson maintained a summer estate called Unquity at the peak of Milton Hill, and during the increasingly violent revolutionary insurrections in Boston, he fled to Milton after his townhouse in the North End was burned by a mob and he was driven from the city after citizens learned he supported the suppression of Massachusetts by the British following the Boston Tea Party. Although Hutchinson's mansion house was demolished in 1947, Governor Hutchinson's Field, owned by the Trustees of Reservations today is a meadow on Milton Hill, with a view of the Neponset River estuary and the skyscrapers of Boston six miles (10 km) away. Both the neighboring house in which Hutchinson lived during the construction of his mansion and the barn of the estate still stand and are both privately owned. The last remnant of Unquity is the ha-ha wall, once a part of the estate's opulent gardens. Both Governor Belcher's house and Governor Hutchinson's field are on the National Register of Historic Places.
Following the revolution, Milton continued to be a thriving agricultural and industrial town, greatly influenced both socially and economically by the prosperity of Boston and the newly-forged American identity.
The town grew extremely wealthy in the late 18th and early 19th century with the booming China Trade and the industrialization of Massachusetts during the early Industrial Revolution. As a result, much of Boston's elite built opulent country estates set on vast grounds throughout the idyllic hills and meadows of the town's more rural sections. An example is the preserved Joshua Wolcott House from 1830. Like many other coastal American cities, high society would leave the cities for the summer, and in the case of Boston, many would move to Milton due to its rural qualities, proximity to Boston, its highly active mercantile wharf, and the families' factories in Lower Mills which allowed the tycoons to continue business in the summer months. Most of these estates were concentrated on Milton Hill, Brush Hill, and Upper Canton Avenue. Among the last remaining of these estates that is entirely intact is the W.E.C Eustis Estate at the base of the Blue Hills on Canton Avenue.
The town was also home to America's first piano factory. Revolutionary Milton is the setting of the opening of the 1940 bestselling historical novel Oliver Wiswell by Kenneth Roberts. The Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory is located in the town, home of the nation's oldest continuously kept meteorological records.
The Granite Railway passed from granite quarries in Quincy to the wharf of Milton on the Neponset River, beginning in 1826. It is often called the first commercial railroad in the United States, as it was the first chartered railway to evolve into a common carrier without an intervening closure. A centennial historic plaque from 1926 and an original switch frog and section of track from the railway can be found in the gardens on top of the Southeast Expressway (Interstate 93) as it passes under East Milton Square. The frog had been displayed at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.
East Milton Square developed as a direct result of the Granite Railway. Quincy granite was seen as of remarkable quality, and there was a high demand for it not only in Boston but abroad. Four sheds in East Milton were used to dress the raw granite stone prior to it being brought by rail to the wharf for transfer to boats to send the stones to the Port of Boston to be sent abroad. East Milton Square was originally termed the "Railway Village" and a train station was located there after 1871 when the Granite Railway became a passenger line of the Old Colony Railroad. The Blue Bell Tavern, which was also a hotel, served as the headquarters of the Granite Railway and it was later named the Russell House. It was located on the site of the current United States Post Office in East Milton Square.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Milton, Massachusetts”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.