Oh, gosh. I live in the mega-historic home of a local colonist who founded a couple of towns around here after leaving this house to his daughter and her hubby. Said colonist happened to be Sir Isaac Newton's nephew. Or maybe it was great-nephew? Something like that. His family graves are still in town. He came here to set up a farm, but only succeeded in growing rocks.
He kept sheep and started a sawmill instead. Made a lot of money from that, as we had plenty of good hardwood oak. There's a few still standing.
A couple of the men who lived in this house, and many people around this area, fought in the Revolutionary War. My neighbors' homes now stand on a farm awarded to one of the Salem Witch Trial victims as compensation for being wrongfully imprisoned. The sawmills mostly supplied war materiel during the Civil War, although a neighboring town supplied a lot of soldiers and was actually named "Unionville" at the time in honor of their Civil War vets.
Other than that, we used the local river power to run various types of mills through the 1800s and early 1900s. Textiles were big around here, we've got good pasture for sheep. Late 1800s, everything was shipped through here by rail and there are still a lot of renovated public houses and inns along the rail lines (which are still used, albeit updated versions).
In the early 1900s, HP Lovecraft set most of his short stories in this area of Massachusetts. About 30 minutes up the road is Concord, MA, where lots of intellectuals and writers lived: HD Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott & her sister Abigail, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Winthrop.
Concord grapes were developed here, as were several types of apples, broccoli, squash.
Now it's special because it's Biotech Land. A lot of huge biotech, pharma and healthcare companies are in nearby cities, and this is a bedroom community for folks who work in the city and commute. Most of us are science geeks, there's quite a good concentration of brains and innovation here. If healthcare was revolutionized tomorrow, we'd be making each other coffee in the kitchen and brainstorming together. We're pretty close to the biggest of big-name universities in the US--Harvard, MIT, Yale.
We are also notoriously picky about our green space. Our neighboring towns are all over-built and their infrastructure is terrible because they didn't control growth. They now have a bunch of empty storefronts and office buildings uglifying their towns, on top of a water/sewage plant that can't service its inhabitants and companies. We, in comparison, are really snotty about growth and make developers' lives a misery, but our water and electric are extremely reliable, houses still sell at close to their appraised value even in this horrible market, and we've got tons of parkland, preservation land, open space, and places where you can see the stars at night. We have plenty of endangered species living in our wetlands, and it's a fine thing to hear the spring frogs croaking, see the stars, and hear the turtles calling their mates in May. Plus, we have our own reservoirs so we don't need the Quabbin.
We also know our neighbors. This is a rare thing in modern America, apparently, but we know them and their dogs by name and often stop by to say hi.
