NORWOOD, MASSACHUSETTS
Norwood is a small working class former milltown that is now famous as the home of the AutoMile, an endless tract of Route 1 that is lined with car dealership after car dealership. Mills once lined the banks of the Neponset River - which winds through the town - and next to the brooks that feed the river as it gains momentum on its way to Dorchester Bay. Just over a hundred years ago, much of the town was still pastoral with great industry baron mansions throughout the land. Jammed into different corners of the town were the clusters of tenement housing that served as shelter for much of the factory worker population. Norwood would become internationally known for its contribution to the publishing world with the production of quality inks, binderies and printing presses before giving way - later in the century - to defense contractors with ties to aerosmithing and parts for spaceships and satellites. These contractors played an integral role in everything that orbited the Earth in the dawn of the Mercury space program. In the beginning, everything in Norwood rotated around a man named Fred Holland Day.
When Englishman William Morris' design concepts went viral, it was photographer, Boston Visionist and Norwood's own Fred Holland Day who first harnessed the energy and rechanneled it into his preeminent publishing company, Copeland & Day.
Day, the son of a wealthy Norwood family, would become entwined in the lives of poet Kahlil Gibran, illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, authors Oscar Wilde and Stephen Crane, and photgraphers Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Alvin Coburn. His name was lost in the past century but he has recently begun to be recognized in a phoenix-like fashion.
