History

Wayland’s pastoral beauty is as treasured today as it was 10,000 years ago by the Native Americans who hunted and fished along the shores of its river and ponds.  Reflecting the principles valued by the Puritan families who established the town in 1638, Wayland to this day is committed to community, independence, education, and land preservation.

Wayland has time and again demonstrated its willingness to sacrifice for those principles: from asserting the separation of church and state, to protesting unfair taxation during the colonial period, to establishing Massachusetts’s first free library, and more recently, to establishing the Sudbury Valley Trustees and protecting services and education when necessary with budget overrides.  Moreover, Wayland soldiers have fought in every American war from King Phillips and the Revolutionary War to today’s conflicts.  Wayland’s citizens have brought those principles to the nation: from colonialist John Rudduck, to philosopher Edmund Sears, to abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, to Watergate investigator Archibald Cox, to Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler.