Foxborough: Straw Hats and Stadiums
Near Providence, Massachusetts
Foxborough was incorporated in seventeen seventy-eight. The town was named for Charles James Fox, the British statesman who backed the colonies. Through the eighteen hundreds it became a hub for straw hat and boot manufacturing, sending goods across New England by rail.
The mills quieted in the twentieth century, and the town might have faded into suburban anonymity. Instead, it became home to Gillette Stadium, one of the most successful franchises in American football history. The New England Patriots have played here since two thousand two, winning six Super Bowl titles, and on game days the population of about eighteen thousand six hundred swells by sixty thousand.
A factory town that makes champions.
