[5] For the residents on the west side of the river, it was a treacherous passage in the winter and attendance at both worship services and Town Meetings was compulsory.

[4] Ephraim Curtis was a successful leader of the militia of West Sudbury and would lend his name to the town's junior high school.

[10][11]: 24–75  Sudbury militiamen participated in the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, where they sniped at British Army troops returning to Boston.

In the book, the poem The Landlord's Tale was the source of the immortal phrase "listen my children and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere."

He brought in the Redstone Schoolhouse from Sterling, which was reputed to be the school in Sarah Josepha Hale's nursery rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb.

[12][13] However, Giuseppi Cavicchio's refusal to sell his water rights scuttled Henry Ford's plans to build an auto parts factory at the site of Charles O. Parmenter's mill in South Sudbury.

[14] In August 1925, a Sudbury farm was the scene of a riot between local members of the Ku Klux Klan and Irish-American youths from the area.

[14] In the period after World War II, Sudbury experienced rapid growth in population and industry.

In the 1970s, the town was home to many of the engineers working in the minicomputer revolution at Digital Equipment Corporation in nearby Maynard.

From 1960–1969, Sudbury challenged and prevailed against a proposal by Boston Edison Company that would have installed overhead transmission lines through what is now Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.

[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] None of these lawsuits were found to have merit, and the buried transmission lines were installed by 2024, which also subsidized the majority of the cost and construction of a section of the Mass Central Rail Trail—Wayside, to be completed in 2025.

[25][26] Residentially, Sudbury's 1-acre (4,000 m2) zoning bylaws helped the town maintain a more rural character through the 1970s and 1980s when developments of single-family Colonials and large Capes established it as an affluent location.

Significant tracts of open space—including much wetland—were preserved in the northern half of town and along the Hop Brook corridor flowing from the Wayside Inn Historic District in the southwest part of town through the King Philip Historic District (the site of a conflict in King Philip's War) and into the Sudbury River at the southeast border with Wayland.

[44][45] On the federal level, Precincts 1A, 2, 3, 4, and 5 of Sudbury are part of Massachusetts's 5th congressional district, represented by Katherine Clark.