Town of Brookline
Norfolk County
 

Brookline's beginnings were rural; its land was originally parceled out to citizens of Boston as allotment farmlands in the 1630's. As allotment holders found it convenient to live close to their crops and livestock, a settlement grew up around the "Muddy River Hamlet". By the end of the seventeenth century, its inhabitants had built a school house, laid out three major roads, obtained exemption from paying taxes to Boston, and were petitioning the Massachusetts General Court for independence.

After three attempts, a petition to be a separate town, signed by 32 freeholders, was granted on November 13, 1705. The Muddy River hamlet was formally incorporated as the Town of Brookline. Samuel Sewall, son of Judge Sewall of Salem Witch Trials fame, lent the community his services as the first Town Clerk and, it is thought, the name of his family's "Brooklin" lands, which lay between the Charles and Muddy Rivers. A Town Meeting and Selectmen governed the Town, then, and still do today.

The residents of Brookline in the early eighteenth century were almost all farmers, many cultivating lands inherited from their fathers or acquired through marriage. Some of their names, such as Heath, Winchester, Clark, Aspinwall, and Devotion, remain with us today as street and neighborhood identifications. Zabdiel Boylston of Brookline, a physician, and uncle of John Adams, earned initial notoriety and enduring fame by introducing inoculation against smallpox to the American colonies in 1721.

By 1775, Brookline, with the rest of Massachusetts, was ready for greater independence from king and country across the water. William Dawes who rode along the Road to the Colleges (now Harvard Street) alerted Brookline that the British were marching on Concord. Three companies of Brookline volunteers mustered on the Town Green at the intersection of Walnut and Warren Streets and headed west, meeting the retreating British at North Cambridge and participating in their rout. One of their number, Isaac Gardner, was reportedly the only Harvard graduate among the patriots to die that day. The following spring, spurred on by John Goddard, a Brookline farmer and a fiery patriot who was to become Wagon-Master General for the Continental Army; the Brookline Town Meeting resolved that if "the Honorable Congress should, for the safety of the American Colonies, declare them independent of the Kingdom of Great Briton, then we. . . will solemnly engage with our Lives and fortune to support them."

Brookline's evolution from an agricultural to a suburban residential community began when wealthy merchants purchased large farms and built summer homes. Senator George Cabot and Samuel and Thomas Hanasyd Perkins were among the first, followed later in the nineteenth century by Theodore Lyman, John Lowell Gardner, Ignatius Sargent, Henry Lee, and Augustus Lowell. David Sears and Amos Lawrence were so taken with their Brookline estates that they gradually expanded them and laid them out as small communities where their friends, relations, and later buyers might join them in country living at Longwood or Cottage Farm.

As transportation routes were developed, making Brookline readily accessible to Boston, the population grew rapidly. In 1806, the Boston-Worcester Turnpike (now Route 9) replaced the old Sherburne Road (Walnut and Heath Street) as the Town's major highway and the main road west from Boston. Mill Dam Road was opened in 1821, extending Beacon Street into Brookline. This consummated Brookline's transition to the desirable commuter suburb that it is today.

The great nineteenth-century architect H.H. Richardson chose to live in Brookline as did his friend and colleague Frederick Law Olmsted. Considered to be the founder of landscape architecture in America, Olmsted served on the Town's Planning Board. Amy Lowell and John and Robert Kennedy were born here; physicians Walter Channing, George Minot, and William Murphy and Nobel laureate John Enders, horticulturist Charles Sprague Sargent, and musicians Serge Koussevitsky, Arthur Fiedler and Roland Hayes are some of the many notables who have been Town residents.