Christmas Light Installation in Belmont, MA

Belmont was established on March 18, 1859, by former citizens of, and on land from the bordering towns of, Watertown, to the south; Waltham, to the west; and Arlington, then known as West Cambridge, to the north. They also wanted a town where no one could buy or sell alcohol (alcohol is now legal to purchase in Belmont). The town was named after Bellmont, the 200-acre (0.8 km²) estate of the largest donor to its creation, John Perkins Cushing. Cushing Square is named after him and what was left of his estate after it nearly burned to the ground and became a Belmont Public Library branch. The easternmost section of the town, including the western portion of Fresh Pond, was annexed by Cambridge in 1880 in a dispute over a slaughterhouse licensed in 1878 on Fresh Pond, so that Cambridge could protect Fresh Pond, part of its municipal water system, by removing neighboring buildings that were polluting into it.Sinclair, Jill (February 13, 2009). “Social Reform and the City”. Fresh Pond: The History of a Cambridge Landscape. MIT Press. pp. 64, 66. ISBN 978-0-262-19591-1 2023. Battles over Water Quality: Contemporary records show that, in the 1870s, there was little scientific agreement about the causes of any pollution to the pond’s water, or about the best means of protection. […] The alleged culprits […] always seemed to be across the town borders in Arlington and, especially Belmont. […] A report commissioned in 1879 concluded that the city needed to acquire a strip of land around the Fresh Pond shoreline up to fifty rods (about 825 feet) wide, to remove buildings from around the shore, and to annex the parts of the neighboring towns of Belmont and Arlington that abutted the pond.

Before its incorporation, Belmont was an agrarian town, with several large farms servicing Boston for produce and livestock. It remained largely agrarian until the turn of the 20th century, when trolley service and better roads were introduced, making it more attractive as a residential area, most notably for the building of large estates. Belmont’s population grew by over 70 percent during the 1920s.

The economics of the town shifted from purely agrarian to a commercial greenhouse base; much of Boston’s flower and vegetable needs were met by the Belmont “hothouses”, which persisted until about 1983, when Edgar’s, the last large greenhouse firm in the area, closed.