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Watertown Information
The Town of Watertown is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United
States. The population was 32,986 at the 2000 census. Watertown, first known as
Saltonstall Plantation, was one of the earliest of the Massachusetts Bay
settlements, having been begun early in 1630 by a group of settlers led by Sir
Richard Saltonstall and the Rev. George Phillips, and officially incorporated
that same year. The first buildings were upon land now included within the
limits of Cambridge. For the first quarter century Watertown ranked next to
Boston in population and area. Since then its limits have been greatly reduced.
Thrice portions have been added to Cambridge, and it has contributed territory
to form the new townships of Weston (1712), Waltham (1738), and Belmont (1859).
In 1632 the residents of Watertown protested against being compelled to pay a
tax for the erection of a stockade fort at Cambridge; this was the first protest
in America against taxation without representation and led to the establishment
of representative government in the colony. As early as the close of the 17th
century Watertown was the chief horse and cattle market in New England and was
known for its fertile gardens and fine estates. Here about 1632 was erected the
first grist mill in the colony, and in 1662 one of the first woolen mills in
America was built here. In the First Parish Church, the site of which is marked
by a monument, the Provincial Congress, after adjournment from Concord, met from
April to July 1775; the Massachusetts General Court held its sessions here from
1775 to 1778, and the Boston town meetings were held here during the siege of
Boston, when many of the well-known Boston families made their homes in the
neighborhood.
For several months early in the American Revolution the Committees of Safety and
Correspondence made Watertown their headquarters and it was from here that
General Joseph Warren set out for Bunker Hill. From 1832 to 1834 Theodore Parker
conducted a private school here and his name is still preserved in the Parker
School, though the building no longer operates as a public school.
The Watertown Arsenal operated continuously as a military munitions and research
facility from 1816 until 1995, when the Army sold the property, by then known as
the Army Materials Technology Laboratory (History of the AMTL) to the town of
Watertown. The Arsenal is notable for being the site of a 1911 strike prompted
by the management methods of operations research pioneer Frederick Winslow
Taylor (Taylor and 1911 Watertown Arsenal Strike). Taylor's method, which he
dubbed "Scientific Management," broke tasks down into smaller components.
Workers no longer completed whole items; instead, they were timed using
stopwatches as they did small tasks repetitively, as Taylor attempted to find
the balance of tasks that resulted in the maximum output from workers. The
strike and its causes were controversial enough that they resulted in
Congressional hearings in 1911; Congress passed a law in 1915 banning the method
in government owned arsenals. Taylor's methods spread widely, influencing such
industrialists as Henry Ford, and the idea is one of the underlying inspirations
of the factory line industrial method.