Founded in 1630 (contemporaneously with Boston), West Roxbury, Massachusetts was originally part of the town of Roxbury and was mainly used as farmland. West Roxbury seceded from Roxbury in 1851, and was annexed by Boston in 1874. The town included the neighborhoods of Jamaica Plain and Roslindale.
Bordered by Roslindale, Hyde Park, Dedham and Brookline, West Roxbury's main thoroughfare is Centre Street, lined with local restaurants and commercial establishments. Today, the neighborhood's tree-lined streets and mostly single family homes give it a suburban feel in an urban setting. Life in the neighborhood centers on political and civic activism as well as local parishes and youth athletic leagues. West Roxbury is home to many of Boston's civil servants. The community boasts a significant proportion of persons of Irish decent as well as a smaller number of more recent Irish immigrants.
The Roxbury Latin School, founded in 1645 and located on Saint Theresa Avenue in West Roxbury since 1927, is considered by some to be oldest school in continuous existence (because unlike Boston Latin founded in 1635 it stayed open during the Revolution because it was a Tory school) in North America. The school's endowment is estimated at $143.8 million, the largest of any boys' school in the United States.
The neighborhood was home to an experimental transcendentalist Utopia community called Brook Farm, which attracted notable writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau.
Like its neighboring communities, West Roxbury's residential development grew with the construction of the West Roxbury branch of the Boston and Providence Rail Road; the area grew further with the development of electric streetcars.
