Village Falls Park is a small riverside park at the southern end of South Street in Needham's Charles River Village, on the site of a mill dam first built in 1675. Today it is a broad sloping lawn with native plantings and a few benches overlooking a small falls where the historic dam still helps manage the Charles River.
Worth knowing
- Nearly 300 years of industry ran on this site starting with a 1675 grist-mill dam, through paper, textile, and tire-cord manufacturing, before the buildings were cleared in 1972-73 to create the park.
Common questions
Why is it also called Cochrane's Dam?
J. Eugene Cochrane and Sons ran the Charles River Bleaching and Print Works at this spot in the 1920s, and the nickname stuck even though the mill buildings were demolished decades ago.