In 1845, retired businessman Henry Grew took his family on vacation to an area south of the City of Boston, in what was then the western section of
Dorchester, and came to a spot in the
Neponset River valley with an unexpectedly pleasant view of the nearby
Blue Hills. He purchased several hundred acres of land there (which later became known as "Grew's Woods", partially preserved today as the
Stony Brook Reservation and the George Wright Golf Course) and moved to the area in 1847. (Grew later served as chairman of the Town of Hyde Park's first board of selectmen and was one of its most prominent citizens.) During the next few years, a group called the Hyde Park Land Company bought about 200 acres of land in the area and began building houses around a small and unofficial passenger stop on the
Boston and Providence Railroad that had developed at Kenny's Bridge, located on the road from
Dedham to
Milton Lower Mills (the road was River Street, and the station today is
Hyde Park Station). At that time, the closest actual
station was in the manufacturing district of
Readville (formerly Low Plains) in Dedham. Alpheus Perley Blake is considered the founder of Hyde Park. He was the organizer in 1856 of the Fairmount Land Company and the Twenty Associates, which developed the Fairmount Hill on the western side of Brush Hill Road in Milton. This led to the establishment of a bridge over the Neponset River and a new station on the
New York and New England Railroad, which is today's
Fairmount Station. In addition to Blake, The Twenty Associates included William E. Abbot, Amos Angell, Ira L. Benton, Enoch Blake, John Newton Brown, George W. Currier, Hypolitus Fisk, John C. French, David Higgins, John S. Hobbs, Samuel Salmon Mooney, William Nightingale, J. Wentworth Payson, Dwight B. Rich, Alphonso Robinson, William H. Seavey, Daniel Warren, and John Williams. Within a few years, the two land companies had merged and growth in the area accelerated. By 1867, the settlements had grown to the point where there were 6 railroad stations in the area. A formal petition was made to the General Court of the Commonwealth and, after settling land and boundary disputes with Dedham and Milton, the Town of Hyde Park was incorporated on April 22, 1868, in
Norfolk County from the settled land in Dorchester (Grew's Woods and the Hyde Park Land Company development), Milton (Fairmount) and Dedham (Readville). Dedham opposed the taking of its land to create the new town. It remained a part of Norfolk County until 1912, when the town voted in favor of annexation to the City of Boston in
Suffolk County. The
54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, one of the first official African-American units in the
United States Army and which was commanded by
Col. Robert G. Shaw and served during the Civil War, was assembled and trained at Camp Meigs in Readville. In the 1960s, Hyde Park threatened to secede from Boston over plans to build a
Southwest Expressway (
Interstate 95) through the town along the route of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, which would bifurcate the neighborhood and displace many residents, as had happened in Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. Hyde Park has also faced other challenges along with its fellow Boston neighborhoods, such as the
busing crisis of the 1970s. Hyde Park has had an active industrial history. For over 100 years, it was the main base of the
Westinghouse Sturtevant Corporation. The Readville area was home to the
Stop & Shop warehouse, until it was moved to
Assonet in the early 2000s. Hyde Park is home to many churches, most notably the Most Precious Blood, Saint Adalbert's and Saint Anne's Roman Catholic churches, and the Episcopal Parish of Christ Church (the oldest parish in Hyde Park, now Iglesia de San Juan), the latter of which was designed by the architectural form of Cram Wentworth & Goodhue and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Hyde Park is also the original home of the
Boston Crusaders, a world class drum and bugle corps founded in 1940 at the Most Precious Blood Parish. ==Community activism==