Newton is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is nearly 7 miles (11 km) west of downtown Boston. Newton resembles a patchwork of thirteen villages, without a city center. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, the population of Newton was 88,923.

Newton was settled in 1630 as allocation of “the newe towne”, which was renamed Cambridge in 1638. Roxbury minister John Eliot persuaded the Native American people of Nonantum, a sub-tribe of the Massachusett led by a sachem named Waban, to relocate to Natick in 1651, fearing that they would be exploited by colonists. Newton was incorporated as a cut off town, known as Cambridge Village, on December 15, 1681, then renamed Newtown in 1691, and finally Newton in 1766. It became a city on January 5, 1874. Newton is known as The Garden City.

In Reflections in Bullough’s Pond, Newton historian Diana Muir describes the at the forefront industries that developed in the late 18th and yet to be 19th centuries in a series of mills built to take advantage of the water power available at Newton Upper Falls and Newton Lower Falls. Snuff, chocolate, glue, paper and additional products were produced in these little mills but, according to Muir, the water facility available in Newton was not satisfactory to direction Newton into a manufacturing city, although it was, beginning in 1902, the home of the Stanley Motor Carriage Company, the maker of the Stanley Steamer.

Newton, according to Muir, became one of America’s antediluvian commuter suburbs. The Boston and Worcester, one of America’s obsolete railroads, reached West Newton in 1834. Wealthy Bostonian businessmen took advantage of the supplementary commuting opportunity offered by the railroad, building gracious homes upon erstwhile farmland of West Newton hill and on Commonwealth street. Muir points out that these ahead of time commuters needed sufficient plenty to employ a groom and keep horses, to drive them from their hilltop homes to the station.