Plumber in Waltham, MA

Waltham was first settled in 1634 as part of Watertown and was officially incorporated as a separate town in 1738. Waltham is most likely named for Waltham Abbey in the County of Essex, England. The first record of the name is from the articles of incorporation, dated January 15, 1738. The name derives from the Anglo-Saxon words, weald or wald “forest” and ham “homestead” or “enclosure.” Waltham had no recognizable town center until the 1830s, when the nearby Boston Manufacturing Company gave the town the land that now serves as its central square.

In the early 19th century, Francis Cabot Lowell and his friends and colleagues established in Waltham the Boston Manufacturing Company-the first integrated textile mill in the United States, with the goal of eliminating the problems of co-ordination, quality control, and shipping inherent in the subcontracting based textile industry. The Waltham-Lowell system of production derives its name from the city and the founder of the mill.

The city is home to a number of large estates, including Gore Place, a mansion built in 1806 for former Massachusetts governor Christopher Gore, the Robert Treat Paine Estate, a residence designed by architect Henry Hobson Richardson and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted for philanthropist Robert Treat Paine, Jr. (1810-1905), and the Lyman Estate, a 400-acre (1.6 km²) estate built in 1793 by Boston merchant Theodore Lyman.