SOUTHBOROUGH — A transportation revolution swept Massachusetts at the beginning of the last century.
Building on the success of the railroad, which first came to Southborough in the 1830s, new industrial transportation moved shoppers, commuters, and tourists. Today, the effect of this revolution is clear.
The Census Bureau estimates that 90% of Southborough residents drive to work. During the first decade of the 20th century, however, the transportation revolution was fiercely contested between the automobile and the electric streetcar, or trolley.
The Boston and Worcester Street Railway Company first came to Southborough in 1903, overcoming objections from the Board of Selectmen and the town newspaper. Streetcar networks sprouted from popular railroad lines like branches from trunks. Bob Kane, Vice
President of the Marlborough Historical Society, explained to the Community Advocate in 2020 that streetcars in the area provided “workers [convenience] so they could easily get to work on time and even go home for lunch.” Southborough was the critical transfer hub for the trolley route, which connected Downtown Southborough, White’s Corner, and Fayville north to Marlborough and Hudson and east-west to Boston and Worcester.
Southborough residents gawked at the first automobiles in 1903. The town history describes how one family “would run to the edge of their front yard and wave at each odd-looking car as it attempted to negotiate the rutted road alongside the trolley rails.”
Automobile enthusiasts published lists of every car owner in Massachusetts, counting nine in Southborough in 1908 and eighteen in 1914. At first, cars were driven by the very well-to-do, as they were worth more than a years’ salary for the average worker. Sarah Choate Sears owned two Renault AXs, a two-cylinder car that could reach speeds up to 35 miles per hour. A Pierce-Arrow was especially popular at first (with Messrs Kidder, Choate, and Gardner), but was quickly supplanted by Ford’s Model T (Wright, Bray, Barney, Boland, Newton, Choate, Flichtner). The headmaster of the Fay School, Waldo B. Fay, was fined $20 in Boston in 1908 for speeding his Packard Model Thirty.
No streetcar line connected to the industrial villages of Southville and Cordaville, making it an onerous task getting from one side of town to the other.
As pedestrians were forced off the road in favor of the automobile, the locations of the town’s new sidewalks show the unique challenges Southborough faced connecting itself. Town Meeting considered the construction of “side walks” on Parkerville (1908), Middle Road (1909), Oak Hill (1914), between Southville and Cordaville (1924), and on Newton Street (1929), routes that connected the borders of the town’s villages.
By the 1920s, as fixed trolley lines were converted to more flexible bus routes and cars became more affordable, the automobile won the transportation contest. Changing economic conditions after World War I afflicted the streetcar company. It reported losses in 1918, went into receivership in 1925, and ended the Hudson line in 1928.
The trolley was shuttered completely in 1932, just as Route 9 was paved and officially designated a state highway.
The automobile had won.