Foxborough, Massachusetts

• 1. Introduction

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  Foxborough, Massachusetts sits 22 miles southwest of Boston, a town of roughly 18,000 people that most of the country only encounters on Sunday afternoons during football season. But the stadium that made Foxborough famous is just the latest chapter in a story that stretches back to 1704, when the first settlers arrived. The town was later named for Charles James Fox, a Whig member of Parliament who championed the American colonists before they had won anything. That choice of name says something about the place: a New England town that has always looked outward, toward bigger stages, bigger stories.

  What does a small Massachusetts town have in common with the 1994 and 2026 FIFA World Cups? How did a paper magnate end up saving a football franchise from moving to St. Louis? And who, exactly, is buried in the history of this seemingly ordinary suburb? The answers are stranger and more specific than the name on the highway sign suggests.

• 2. Named for a Rebel

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  Settled in 1704 and incorporated in 1778, Foxborough was formally named for Charles James Fox, a Whig politician who sat in Parliament and openly sided with the American colonies during the years before independence. At a time when most British politicians viewed the rebellion as treason, Fox's advocacy was a genuine political risk. The town's founders, in choosing that name, were making a statement as much as a geographic designation.

  The town that grew from that settlement was not a single unified community for much of its early life. Distinct neighborhoods developed their own identities: Foxvale and Paineburgh remained semi-independent into the early twentieth century, while Quaker Hill sat in the south and Lakeview, also called Donkeyville, occupied the west. These small enclaves each had their own character before the town cohered into a single fabric in the early 1900s.

  Among Foxborough's notable native sons is Seth Boyden, born here before he moved to Newark, New Jersey and became one of that city's most celebrated citizen-inventors. Boyden is credited with inventing patent leather and malleable iron, and he was among the first to develop the daguerreotype process. His story, largely forgotten today, points to a recurring pattern in Foxborough's history: people and things that originate here go on to outsized consequence elsewhere.

• 3. Hats, Fire, and Industry

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  In 1886, a building went up in Foxborough that was, at the time, the largest straw hat factory in the world. For a small New England town, that was a remarkable distinction. The factory's life was short and eventful: it closed as a hat operation in 1891, reopening in 1894 as the Inman and Kimball hat factory, suggesting that millinery had not entirely abandoned the address.

  The building's end came dramatically. In 1936, it burned to the ground in what witnesses described as a spectacular mid-day fire. The spectacle must have been considerable: a structure that size, in flames in the middle of the day, would have been visible for miles across Norfolk County's flat terrain. Nothing of the factory survives. The Foxborough Post Office now stands on the site, an institutional replacement for an industrial one.

  That arc from world-record factory to post office captures something about the rhythm of New England manufacturing towns in the twentieth century. Industry rises, burns or closes, and civic infrastructure fills the gap. The hat factory's story also gestures toward F. Gilbert Hills State Forest, which today encompasses 1,027 acres across Foxborough and neighboring Wrentham. Within those woods, stone structures survive that some researchers believe predate the town's founding entirely, attributed by local tradition to Algonquin tribes.

• 4. Kraft, the Stadium, and the Rescue

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  Schaefer Stadium opened in 1971 on Foxborough's landscape as the New England Patriots' first permanent home, after the franchise had spent its opening eleven seasons sharing facilities around Boston. The Sullivan family owned both the team and the stadium for years, until they sold the Patriots in 1988. The stadium itself did not transfer cleanly: it slid into bankruptcy.

  Robert Kraft, a paper magnate, acquired the stadium out of that bankruptcy. What followed was a sequence of events that reshaped professional sports in New England. In 1994, the Patriots were weighing a move to St. Louis. Kraft, as the stadium's owner, refused to release the team from its lease. That refusal kept the franchise in Massachusetts. Kraft then purchased the Patriots outright and, in 1996, founded the New England Revolution as one of the charter clubs of Major League Soccer.

  The original Foxboro Stadium was eventually replaced by Gillette Stadium, which opened in 2002. Kraft continued developing the surrounding land: the Patriot Place shopping plaza completed construction in 2009, an outdoor retail complex built on land Kraft had acquired around the stadium. Adjacent to Gillette Stadium today stands the Patriots Hall of Fame and a statue of Tom Brady, markers of the franchise's later dynasty that trace their roots to that bankruptcy acquisition in the early 1990s.

• 5. World Cup, Twice

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  Foxboro Stadium hosted multiple matches during the 1994 FIFA World Cup, a tournament that brought international football to venues across the United States for the first time. For a town of roughly 16,000 people at the time, hosting World Cup games was a genuinely unusual experience: global sports tourism arriving at a suburban Massachusetts address.

  Gillette Stadium is scheduled to host matches again during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, making Foxborough one of a small number of American locations to appear on both tournament rosters. The 32-year gap between those two tournaments spans the entire arc of the stadium's replacement: the original Foxboro Stadium is gone, Gillette stands in its place, and the town has grown by several thousand residents.

  The 1994 tournament connection also illuminates one of the town's less obvious ties to global affairs. Among the notable people associated with Foxborough is Nguyen Van Thieu, president of South Vietnam from 1967 to 1975, and Madame Nguyen Van Thieu, who served as the last First Lady of South Vietnam during that same period. Their presence in the town's roster of notable residents places Foxborough, unexpectedly, in the story of the Vietnam War's final chapter and its aftermath in the Vietnamese diaspora community.

• 6. People from This Address

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  Tim Lefebvre grew up in Foxborough and went on to play bass on David Bowie's final album, Blackstar, released weeks before Bowie's death. That single credit connects a small Massachusetts town to one of the most discussed last recordings in rock history. Lefebvre also plays with the Tedeschi Trucks Band, but Blackstar is the connection that places Foxborough in an unexpected musical lineage.

  JoJo, born Joanna Levesque, is from Foxborough. She became an R&B singer-songwriter and actress. Camille Kostek, the model who appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue and who is the partner of football player Rob Gronkowski, also comes from here. That Gronkowski's partner grew up in the same town where the team he played for makes its home is the kind of coincidence that seems implausible but is simply local geography at work.

  Sam Berns was born in Foxborough. He became publicly known as an inspiring teenager living with progeria, a rare accelerated-aging condition, before his death at a young age. His story drew national attention to the condition and to the research community working to understand it. Frank Boyden, a relative of the earlier Seth Boyden, became headmaster of Deerfield Academy, one of the country's most prominent prep schools. Seth Williams, another Foxborough native, served as Quartermaster General of the United States Marine Corps from 1937 to 1944, a position that carried significant logistical responsibility during the lead-up to and early years of World War II.