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 NORTON (Town Hall) - Norton, MA Posted by:  nomadwillie
N 41° 58.248 W 071° 10.783
19T E 319393 N 4648831
Norton for its rich history has one plain vanilla building for a town hall. Norton today has a population of 19,200. The population when the book was written was about 3,100.
Waymark Code: WM17AJ7
Location: Massachusetts, United States
Date Posted: 01/14/2023
Views: 0
NORTON is a pleasant small country town, well wooded and watered,
which gives the general impression, no longer strictly correct, of a typical
New England farming community. As it occupies a level plain, without
hills of note, the landscape is not much diversified and makes no immediate or striking appeal. Norton is the sort of place, however, which
grows upon the affections. In every direction there are agreeable walks,
running now across open pastures, walled by the loose stones cleared from the fields by the first settlers, now past some small sawmill still in operation, now through pungent pines, and coming suddenly upon a pretty
brook or delightful pond. These things the girls at Wheaton College
have known for the past hundred years.
For Norton is distinctively a college town, the seat of Wheaton College, one of the pioneer schools for the education of women in this country.
It is the only small independent college for women in Massachusetts which is neither co-educational nor affiliated with other institutions,
with a limited enrollment of five hundred students in 1937, representing
twenty-one States, Puerto Rico, and three foreign countries. The faculty
is composed of both men and women.
' That they may have life and have
it more abundantly' is the college motto.
Norton, originally a rural and agricultural village, took on its academic
character with the founding of Wheaton Female Seminary, established by Judge Laban Wheaton in 1834 as a memorial to his daughter. Mary
Lyon was its organizer, but left to found Mount Holyoke College after two years.
Jewelry has been manufactured in Norton since 1871, the first concern
being established by W. A. Sturdy. The Barrowsville Bleachery has
been in operation for over thirty years. These, along with the Talbot
Wool Combing Company, the T. J. Holmes Company, manufacturers of atomizers, and the paper and wooden box factories, represent the industrial activity of the town today.
Norton for its size had an unusual amount of trouble with the powers
of darkness. Beside Dora Leonard and Naomi Burt, town witches, old- timers tell a story from Colonial days about one Major George Leonard,
a highfalutin fellow who sold himself soul and body to the Devil for gold. In 1716 His Satanic Majesty cashed in on his bargain, they say, whistling the Major's soul out of his body and then carrying his body
off through the roof. Anyone who doesn't believe this can see with his own eyes the Devil's footprints on a rock below the eaves where Satan
landed when he jumped off with his heavy burden. No one saw the corpse at the funeral, there being nothing but a log of wood in the box,
to avert the townsfolks' suspicions.
American-Guide-Series - Massachusetts: a Guide to its Places and People, p.308-309 (1937)
Norton for its rich history has one ugly town hall. Norton today has a population of 19,200. The population when the book was written was about 3,100.
Book: Massachusetts
Page Number(s) of Excerpt: 309-309
Year Originally Published: 1937
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