Norton is a town in Bristol County, Massachusetts, United States, and contains the villages of Norton Center and Chartley. The population was 19,202 at the 2020 census. Home of Wheaton College, Norton hosts the Dell Technologies Championship, a tournament of the PGA Tour held annually on the Labor Day holiday weekend at the TPC Boston golf club. History Winnecunnet Lake was an ancient fishing, hunting, and camping site known for thousands of years by Indigenous Pokanoket and Mattakeeset families. In the old days before dams and other obstructions, rivers running gently into the lake and swamplands around it provided canoe routes north to Lake Massapoag and south to the Taunton River. Growing tall in the lowlands along two of Norton’s main waterways—Wading and Rumford—- and continuing further along their convergence into Three Mile River, a thick forest of cedar trees grew dark and intertwined together. These swampy forests were places of safety in the winter, when the wet uneven ground was frozen over and the thick tree branches kept families and animals alike more shaded from the wind and snow. The deep inland swamps of Norton remained unsettled by English colonists for many years after their initial arrival on the Massachusetts coast. But by the late 1640s, the townships of Rehoboth and Taunton were looking to expand their bounds to the north, south, and west. The settlement of Rehoboth bought the lands north of it—what would become Attleboro—from Wamsutta in the 1666 North Purchase. Taunton, too, was looking to acquire more land to develop into meadows and pastureland, cutting the forests back and using the felled timber to feed the construction and fuel industries. The forests and swampland of Norton were first legally settled by European colonists after the Taunton North Purchase in 1668. This deed of purchase from Metacomet entitled the men of Taunton to the lands above their current settlement—in the upland forests, cedar swamps, rivers, meadows, and lakes that would become established as Norton, Mansfield, and Easton. In 1686, more payments to access rights for the North Purchase lands were made by Taunton men to Josias Wampatuck, a descendent of Chickatabut. During King Philip’s War, “a group of twenty Taunton men, fearing attack" against their settlement "followed the Three Mile River to its confluence… at the Coweset (Wading) and Rumford Rivers and the thick swamp between them,” attacking women and children who were sheltering there. In this