Needhamites Make History
December 15, 2025
• In her latest book, published in October, Gloria Greis shares her passion for Needham history through a series of stories.
Gloria Greis’s official title is executive director of the Needham History Center and Museum. But it may be more accurate to describe her as a professional thread-puller.
“You get a thread, you keep pulling it, and you get all these interesting stories about what the town was like that aren’t always covered in any other way,” Greis said in an interview. Whether it be a recovered map, an unusual gravestone or mysterious familial circumstances, Greis said she feels it’s her job to understand it, to explain it.
She happily descends down rabbit holes often. “Sometimes,” she said, “the stories just write themselves.”
Her latest book, “All Roads Lead to Needham,” charts the historical significance of the town and the physical and metaphorical routes people take to end up here. She chronicles that history in more than 40 Needham vignettes, starting with the town’s separation from Dedham in 1711.
Through the book, she said she hopes “to give people a different perspective on history.”
“History is not just boring names and dates. History is like ‘Game of Thrones,’ except it really happened,” Greis said. “It’s got love and death and treachery and sex and violence and sacrifice, and it’s so full of human emotion.”
Greis selected the stories from her approximately 300 newsletter entries she’s written for the history center over the last few years, many of which appeared as columns in the now-defunct Needham Times.
In one account, Greis detailed the Norfolk Rifle Rangers, an 1830s Massachusetts militia that fell into a gap between conflicts. Their predecessors saw military action, as would their sons in the Civil War. But as author George Kuhn Clarke puts it in his 1912 book “History of Needham,” the men often gathered to eat lunch in a tavern, Greis said, because they had nothing else to do.
“It’s objectively funny, but it wasn’t funny to them because they were on guard, they were ready,” she said. “They were just fortunate that there was no opportunity.”
While researching the Joshua Lewis house, a historic home at 178 South St., Greis stumbled on the story of Antonio Courante, a seaman from the Azores who married the daughter of the landowner. Greis still wonders over how an illiterate, multiracial mariner ended up in Needham in 1820, married into a prominent family.
Looking into old directories, Greis found his children rose into the middle class, as their father “was in his 60s and still schlepping barrels and bundles off of ships,” she said. She also combed through Courante’s naturalization papers, photographs of his grandchildren and property records to understand his journey as a Needhamite.
Some answers remain unknown, but that’s part of the fun.
“I just love this stuff. I just love trying to figure it out, and finding the information, making the pieces fall into place,” she said.
Polly Attridge, the history center’s archivist, said they have more than 5,000 images catalogued. She fields requests from across the country from people with Needham ties searching for information.
When Greis is researching for her next write-up, Attridge looks through their files for relevant documents. But Attridge credits Greis for going beyond their own archives while creating “All Roads Lead to Needham.”
“Gloria, in case you couldn’t tell from talking to her, is brilliant,” said Attridge, who joined the history center in the late ’90s. “She is very, very smart, very well-versed in Needham history.”
Greis previously lived in Cambridge, where she worked at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, first as a cataloger and then as the collections manager, for about 13 years. With the Peabody, Greis published three books.
And as the book’s title suggests, Greis’s road winded into Needham in 1991. When the Needham history center — then called the Needham Historical Society — sought their first executive director, Greis jumped. She was hired in June 2002.
“I think I have the most fun job in Needham,” she said. “It’s just, it’s fun.”
There are still mysteries to uncover in Greis’s Needham, including an odd burial of two young boys in the cemetery. They aren’t buried with their families, and little information is on their tombs, though they’re buried together in a built tomb typically reserved for wealthy families.
Greis recently discovered the existence of a public bath house on Hunnewell Street in the mid-1800s, thanks to an old clipping Attridge unearthed. The facility only lasted about five or six years, not long enough to be present on the town’s 1876 map, making it a new piece of history for Greis.
Through the book, Greis said she hopes residents continue to unlock their fascination and curiosity with the history below their feet.
“I think knowing your history, knowing your local history, knowing your personal history, that’s your identity,” Greis said.
Now with more than two decades on the job, Greis still finds new roads to travel down in town. With her history glasses on, Greis said she sees iterations of the past in current buildings and sites. She said it’s like “seeing ghosts.”
“You look at a building, the store on the corner of Great Plain and Chestnut, and I can also see that store that was there in the 19th century,” she said. “You have that double vision, but it gives you a real sense for the texture of what the town was like, how the town changed, and your part in all of this, and how you’re part of that continuum.”
Marc Mandel, executive director of The Needham Channel, is a board member of the Needham History Center and Museum. He was not involved in the writing or editing of this story.
Derick Risner, special projects producer at The Needham Channel, is a volunteer on the marketing and publicity committee at the Needham History Center and Museum. He was not involved in the writing or editing of this story.
