At a bend in the Charles River, before Massachusetts had its name carved into stone, was Natick, one of the first Praying Towns in New England. founded in 1651 by the Massachusett and Nipmuc people. The Puritan minister, John Eliot, spent fourteen years translating the Bible into the Massachusett language — the first Bible ever printed in North America, and used it to preach to the Indigenous people both here and in the other thirteen Praying Towns established throughout Massachusetts as a home of Christian converts. Click here for a seven-minute video about Natick posted on August 4, 2026 by Still New England.

The South Natick Dam on the Charles River that runs through Natick, standing since 1934 on a site used for fishing weirs and grist mills for centuries before that, is slated for eventual removal — thus the falls may not look the same in just a few years.

During King Philip’s War in 1675, Natick’s Praying Indians were rounded up and taken to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where the currents made escape nearly impossible. Many of the young men were later sold into slavery in the Caribbean. Two years later, while survivors were still rebuilding at the fortified village near what’s now Lake Cochituate, Mohawk raiders struck in the night and marched off sixteen more young men — never to be heard from again.

The land remembers, even where the record doesn’t. Bacon Free Library sits atop what was part of a Native burial ground; graves were disturbed twice — once in its construction, once when the road beside it was widened. The remains were eventually returned to their descendants in the 1990s.