Saxonville is as much more than a place name.

Saxonville is a quintessential mill village in the City of Framingham, Massachusetts. Though the exact boundaries of Saxonville will vary depending on who you ask, geographically, it is occupies the northeast quadrant of the City, bordered by the towns of Sudbury, Wayland, and Natick and including a portion of the shoreline of Lake Cochituate.

Most agree that the center of the village is McGrath Square. It is defined by Saxonville Mills, a late 19th century multi-building brick edifice that has had many iterations over the past 200 years and presently is home to many small businesses and a thriving artists community. McGrath Square includes the intersection of Concord, Elm, Danforth, Water, and Center Streets and the Sudbury River.

Because Saxonville grew within the winding course of the Sudbury River and its tributaries, it is a village of bridges old and new. Saxonville was Framingham’s first colonial settlement in the 17th century and its first industrial center, powered by the river, which and includes a large mill pond with a spectacular waterfall. The village center also includes numbers of historic buildings that reflect the village’s long and rich history.

Discovering Saxonville: a short history

Stephen W. Herring, Framingham’s former Town Historian and the author of the book Framingham: An American Town for the town’s 300th anniversary, noted that people have been discovering Saxonville for thousands of years. He wrote,

People have been discovering Saxonville for thousands of years. First, it was the native peoples who trekked through the narrow passage between the chain of lakes now known as Cochituate and the winding river now known as the Sudbury. It was a place marked by The Falls, a sudden and rapid drop of the river where it crossed an ancient fault line.

Descendants of those early nomadic Indians put down roots and formed a village by The Falls, where spawning fish were easily harvested in weirs and eel pots. They were of the Nipmuc tribe, a passive people whose culture dictated that most of the hard work be done by their womenfolk. The Nipmuc had abandoned their village at The Falls when the first European explorers and settlers came on the scene.

Explorer John Oldham discovered what would become Saxonville in 1633. In 1647 a Sudbury man by the name of John Stone ventured beyond the bounds of his town and established the first colonial homestead there. Over time John Stone acquired most of the land around The Falls. He harnessed the power of the river for a grist mill, Framingham’s first business enterprise, and households for his children. The area soon became known to all as Stone’s End.

When Framingham became an incorporated town in June of 1700, it was made up of eight different areas of settlement, each with its own character and background. One of these, and the oldest, was Stone’s End.

Stone’s End remained a place of farms and small mills until the early nineteenth century when it was discovered by Yankee businessmen looking to make their fortunes in the new textile industry. New larger mills rose over Cochituate Brook and the Sudbury River, at first processing cotton, then wool. The first major woolen mill was called the Saxon Factory Company. Its name soon inspired a new way to refer to the surrounding village, Saxonville, even though the company itself folded in the 1830’s.

When the Great Famine ravaged Ireland in the 1840’s, dozens of families discovered Saxonville as a place where they could find jobs and practice their Catholic religion in an atmosphere of tolerance. The town provided new school rooms and a public hall for the booming village in 1847 with a building soon dubbed “the Athenaeum.”

Mill owner Michael Simpson soon became the principal mover and shaker of Saxonville. He enlarged the mills and built worker housing that still makes up much of the housing stock of the central village. He laid out parks and drives and recreation areas for the benefit of his employees. When his vast mill complex burned to the ground in 1883, Simpson embarked on a rebuilding program that gave us the red brick complex we see today. The Simpson family controlled the mills and the village until 1919.

Simpson’s carpet weaving operation in Roxbury was then consolidated with the Saxonville operations and the company name became Roxbury Carpet, a name well-known in the village until the mills finally closed in the 1970’s.

As the textile industry in Saxonville struggled and declined, a new group was discovering Saxonville: the suburbanites. After World War II, developers like the Campanella Brothers and Brossi Brothers filled the farmers’ fields and pastures surrounding the village with rows and rows of affordable single-family dwellings. From Longfield to Minefield, the developments were marketed to veterans and city families looking for a new life with open spaces and some quaint New England charm.

That process of discovery is still going on today. Many of these newcomers along with members of long-established families have banded together in recent years to make sure the quality and culture of their village will be preserved, and they are truly the Friends of Saxonville.

[Originally printed in the program of the first FOS Discover Saxonville day on June 9, 2001.]