From its incorporation in 1729 through the late
nineteenth century, Westford, Massachusetts, was a farming community sparsely populated by families of English ancestry. But in the first years of the twentieth century, a significant change occurred in Westford when mills that had opened in the town 's Forge Village and Graniteville sections began to recruit workers from Russia, Poland, England, Ireland, Scotland, Italy, and Canada. Westford depicts what the arrival of the mills and the mill workers meant to the town and its evolution in the twentieth century. The book also describes the effect of the mills ' demise in the 1950s, and chronicles the town 's recent development into a very appealing bedroom community for workers in Boston."