Living in Westborough, MA

About Westborough

Westborough was incorporated in 1717 as the hundredth town in Massachusetts, set off from Marlborough with twenty-seven families. Eli Whitney, later the inventor of the cotton gin, was born here in 1765, and a stone on Eli Whitney Street marks the spot. In 1810 the road between Boston and Worcester became an official turnpike through town, today's Route 9. Once the railroad came through the center, the commercial life of the town followed it, leaving brick blocks downtown and smaller turnpike villages like Wessonville.

The land is a broad central plain ringed by rounded hills, with a large cedar swamp at its eastern end and the Assabet River along part of the northern edge. Lake Chauncy, in the north, has a summer beach open to Westborough and Northborough residents and is used for swimming, boating and fishing. The Westborough Charm Bracelet, a roughly 28-mile loop trail developed since 2000 by the Westborough Community Land Trust and the town's Open Space Preservation Committee, links most of the major open spaces, with side trails planned to reach schools and neighborhoods.

The north end of town, around Lake Chauncy, was long given over to state institutions. The state opened a reform school on the lake in 1848, described as the first publicly funded reform school in the United States. In 1884 its grounds passed to the new Westborough State Hospital, which opened in 1886 as the first state homeopathic psychiatric hospital in New England, on more than 600 acres between Lyman Street and the lake. The hospital closed in 2010, and the complex was demolished in 2019 despite its 1994 National Register listing. After voters approved a sale in 2016, the town sold 37 acres of the former hospital site on Lyman Street, at the Northborough line, to Pulte Homes, which the Worcester Business Journal reported was planning 700 units in 14 buildings.

Homes in Westborough

The Massachusetts Historical Commission notes two-story, center-chimney colonial houses, worker cottages grouped in the center and Italianate, Second Empire and Queen Anne houses on High Street. The Vintonville Historic District, just east of the center, is made up of modest houses on smaller lots, largely built between 1860 and 1890.