Town of Southborough

Southborough, like its neighbors, was primarily a farming community. These tree-ringed reservoirs, complete with rock outcroppings, even a small island, here or there, do much to create the town's image as a quiet pastoral place. From its earliest days as "Stony Brook," as this southern portion of the new town of Marlboro was known in the late 1600s, through its separation as a town of its own on July 17, 1727.

Best remembered, perhaps, is the Cordaville Cotton and Woolen Mill that made blankets for the Civil War and left its name to one of the four villages.

Southborough would remain a rural community, growing substantially only much later with the post-World War II housing boom and the advent of the "high tech" industry and Route 495.

There were the first settlers and the town's own company of Minutemen, the preachers and teachers who guided their flocks in matters of education and the spirit, the town "fathers" and, rather late, town "mothers," who have cared for its government and public life since the first Selectmen were elected in 1727.

Yet we look back, too, to realize that for all of its nearly 275 years the people who have walked these ways before us gave us the Southborough that we call home.

As did they, we struggle with allocating town funds, with electing officials in whom we can be confident, and with preserving the special flavor that drew us here and makes so many of us want to stay. It continues to be a worthwhile pursuit, this taking care of our town