Excerpt from A Gazetteer of the State of Massachusetts: With Numerous Illustrations The design of this work is to present in alphabetical order a clear and concise topographical description, together with a brief historical and statistical notice, of the several counties, cities, towns, and villages of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Since any attempt of the kind was made the State has rapidly advanced, not only as to its population, but also in respect to its industrial and commercial enterprises, its literary, social, and religious institutions, and its intercommunications by the railroad and electric telegraph. New cities and towns have been organized; new branches of industry introduced; new methods of utilizing waste material, and new machines for lessening manual labor, adopted; and thus new sources of wealth and power disclosed. Since the closing of the war, art, industry, education, aspiration, have received fresh impulse; and the Massachusetts of to-day is by no means the Massachusetts of 1860. Advancement everywhere is distinctly visible. Now, while we have many excellent town histories and directories, and innumerable special reports of industrial, educational, and civil interests, we have no work giving the topographical, geological, and general social, religious, literary, and business aspect of the entire Commonwealth with its several sections as it now presents itself; we have no compendium from which the public may obtain a just conception of the progress which the State of late has made, or of the attitude in which it is now standing. To meet this want; to portray the varied local scenery, the genius, the spirit, the industrial and intellectual activities, of the people; to form a guide-book of the State adapted to the family, the student, the man of business, and the man of leisure, the editor and the literary institution, - has been, both as it regards the plan and the detail, the writers constant aim. His material has been abundant; his chief difficulty has been in the selection and the condensation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.