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Norton is a town in Bristol County, Massachusetts, United States, and contains the village of Norton Center. The population was 19,202 at the 2020 census. Home of Wheaton College, Norton hosts the Dell Technologies Championship, a tournament of the PGA Tour held annually on the Labor Day holiday weekend at the TPC Boston golf club. [edit] History
Winnecunnet Lake was an ancient fishing, hunting, and camping site known for thousands of years by Indigenous Pokanoket and Mattakeeset families. In the old days before dams and other obstructions, rivers running gently into the lake and swamplands around it provided canoe routes north to Lake Massapoag and south to the Taunton River. Growing tall in the lowlands along two of Norton’s main waterways--Wading and Rumford—- and continuing further along their convergence into Three Mile River, a thick forest of cedar trees grew dark and intertwined together. These swampy forests were places of safety in the winter, when the wet uneven ground was frozen over and the thick tree branches kept families and animals alike more shaded from the wind and snow. The deep inland swamps of Norton remained unsettled by English colonists for many years after their initial arrival on the Massachusetts coast. But by the late 1640s, the townships of Rehoboth and Taunton were looking to expand their bounds to the north, south, and west. The settlement of Rehoboth bought the lands north of it—what would become Attleboro—from Wamsutta in the 1666 North Purchase. Taunton, too, was looking to acquire more land to develop into meadows and pastureland, cutting the forests back and using the felled timber to feed the construction and fuel industries. The forests and swampland of Norton were first legally settled by European colonists after the Taunton North Purchase in 1668. This deed of purchase from Metacomet entitled the men of Taunton to the lands above their current settlement—in the upland forests, cedar swamps, rivers, meadows, and lakes that would become established as Norton, Mansfield, and Easton. In 1686, more payments to access rights for the North Purchase lands were made by Taunton men to Josias, a descendent of Chickatabut. During King Philip’s War, “a group of twenty Taunton men, fearing attack" against their settlement "followed the Three Mile River to its confluence… at the Coweset (Wading) and Rumford Rivers and the thick swamp between them,” attacking the women and children who were sheltering. In this fight, at so-called "Lockety Neck," the men murdered or otherwise participated in the killing of Weetamoo, the saunkskwa leader of the Pocasset people. When Norton was first settled in 1669 it was called North Taunton for its location on the northern border of Taunton, Massachusetts. The town was renamed "Norton"—after Norton, Oxfordshire, England, where many early settlers had originated—when the town was officially established on March 17, 1710. Parts of Norton were set out as Easton on December 21, 1725, and as Mansfield on April 26, 1770. Metacomet, the Wampanoag Indian sachem also known as "King Phillip", used to camp at a cave made by huge glacial rocks resting on top of each other, just north-east of Lake Winnecunnet. Every Norton school child has been entertained with the legend of King Phillip's Cave. The bandstand within the town center was originally erected using donated funds during the first Gulf War, in honor of the veterans who served from Norton. In elementary school, students were told the story of the "Devil's Foot Print", where Major George Leonard sold his soul to the devil. The devil's foot print can be seen at Norton's Joseph C. Solmonese Elementary School, on land which was once Leonard's farmland. Every 26 years, the school unburies a time capsule, the last of which was buried in 1999. The time capsule will be opened next in 2026. The Sun Chronicle describes: Norton is a small but slowly-evolving town.So it was in December 1997, when a traffic light was installed at the intersection of routes 123 and 140 in Norton. It was the town's first full traffic light and, in a manner of speaking, it declared "Norton isn't Mayberry anymore." Norton is also a location in the claimed paranormal Bridgewater Triangle. [edit] Research Tips[edit] External LinksVital Records of Norton - Google Books History of the town of Norton - Google Books
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