The 13 Villages of Newton, Mass

"Newton is made up of a dozen or so villages, the boundaries of which are so obscure that one may move about the city without ever noticing the passage from one village to the next."
-- Elsie M. Husher(1)

When I moved to Newton, I was given a City-produced booklet (2) which enumerated 14 villages, however, Stephen Gartrell at the Planning Department says there are only 13:
Auburndale
Chestnut Hill
Lower Falls
Newton Centre
Newton Corner
Newton Highlands
Newtonville
Nonantum
Oak Hill
Thompsonville
Upper Falls
Waban
West Newton

On the other hand, in 1930, the Clerk of the city Board of Assessors only enumerated 11, with Newton Corner, Thompsonville, and Oak Hill missing (3), while the Newton Village Study, a substantive examinination of the villages, got the count back up to 14 by adding "Four Corners", which is a neighborhood.

[The City of Newton's GIS department no longer provides a Villages Map! You can, however, access other types of maps (in PDF/Adobe Acrobat format only) by going to the GISMap Library. If you miss the Villages map, feel free to drop a line to Ann Cornaro (acornaro@ci.newton.ma.us), director of Information Technology.]

For history buffs, the U.S. Library of Congress (http://www.loc.com) has amazing interactive versions of maps of Newton that were published in 1878 and 1897. Go to United States -- Maryland -- Mountain Lake Park link (in their "American Memory" collection), then scroll down to "United States--Massachusetts--Newton."

In some ways, villages in the city of Newton are a state of mind; there are no formal borders, but everyone knows in which village they live. Some village names are official Post Office town designations (although the Post Office labels as Newton Center that which is properly written Newton Centre, thank you very much). One village, Chestnut Hill, actually shares its name with a neighboring area in the Town of Brookline, although nobody local seems to have the slightest difficulty telling where Newton ends and Brookline begins.

Newton, Mass., Citizens Web Pages www.newtoncitizens.com
Copyright (c) by Bobbi Fox.