Mattapan is founded.

Originally part of Dorchester, Mattapan begins as a farming community and an early trading and manufacturing center because of its location on the Neponset River. It is annexed to Boston with the rest of Dorchester in 1870.* Expansion of the railroad and the extension of the streetcar lines spurs residential development in the last half of the 19th century. It becomes the center of Boston’s Jewish community in the mid–20th century, until an ill-conceived mortgage lending program transforms it into one that s largely African-American and Caribbean by the mid 1970s.