If you live in Southborough, chances are that quite often you'll find yourself driving across or past a reservoir in your comings and goings around town. 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. But, beyond enhancing the aesthetics, these several bodies of water and the aqueduct represent a major turning point in the town's history. The taking of land for their construction in the late 1800s-nearly 2,000 acres in all-changed the character of Southborough's four villages permanently. As town historian Richard Noble put it, they would "forever alter" the town. Here's why that statement is true.
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, and continuing into the first two centuries of its existence, Southborough, like its neighbors, was primarily a farming community. Yes, there were the necessary saw and grain mills, even an iron works, but most of its inhabitants made their livings tilling the soil, cultivating their orchards, or tending their dairy herds.

By the mid-1800s, however, came the railroad and small factories were springing up along the town's two branches of the Sudbury River and its tributaries. 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. And with the passing years came straw bonnet, plaster, brush, and boot and shoe factories, thriving now in Fayville as well as Cordaville. But then, as the end of the 19th Century approached, Boston and its burgeoning population, now becoming accustomed to indoor plumbing, was searching for water beyond Chestnut Hill and Cochituate. The Water Works looked to Wachusett in Boylston, to the northwest of Southborough, for its next supply-and built a dam to create storage for the water on its way to the city. The dam was across the upper branch of the Sudbury coming into Southborough from Marlboro.

Thus it was that the 1898 building of the Fayville Dam assured that Southborough's prospering industry would lose much of its water power and, rather than gaining its livelihood from manufacturing, 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. The huge waterworks project also added to the growing Irish population of the town and brought the first wave of Italians. They were the ancestors of many who remain to this day.

While there are dozens of names to be found in the annals of our past, there has to be one family that, among its contributions, created the town center that we still know today. For it was members of the Burnett family who founded St. Mark's Church, St. Mark's School, and the Fay School, as well as Deerfoot Farm, the premier establishment of the town from the mid-1800s until well into the 1900s.

Add the Choate family who donated the Community House to the Village Society and Francis Fay's donation of the first $500 for a town library, and you see that much of the center of town, with the lawns and characteristic buildings of the schools and the English-style stone church, is what it is because of families prominent two centuries ago.