~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Subject: Bolton, MA Historical Homes with narratives Historical Homes listed with the Bolton Historical Commission Each is a clickable for a narrative about the home and the genealogy of the owners. In 1692, Lancaster designated several houses as garrisons, where settlers were to retreat in the threat of attack. Two are believed to have been located within the borders of Bolton - the garrison of Lt. Thomas Wilder and John Hinds near the center and north part of Wataquadoc,and east of Wataquadoc the house of the less fortunate Ensign John Moore, who was later killed by Indians in 1702. By 1700 there was also some settlement by the Houghton family in north central Bolton. When garrisons were again designated during Queen Anne's War in 1704, settlement within Bolton had increased enough to require three garrisons. By then members of the Houghton family had built houses on their large landholdings in the north central part of the territory in the vicinity of Bare Hill Road. Two houses, the garrisons of John and Jonathan Moore in the southeast, and of Gamaliel Beaman on the east slope of Wataquadoc, are gone, but the foundation of the third garrison, the house of Josiah Whetcomb (Whitcomb), remains. Visit the historical sites at the website below. http://www.historicalcommission.town.bolton.ma.us/main/inventoryforms.html At the website above, each historical property below is a clickable. Jonathan Ball House mid-18th C. and later Capt. Benjamin Atherton House ca. 1726 F. Houghton/Learned House ca. 1800 Thomas Moore House mid-19th Wheeler/Evans House 1819 Fairbank/Longley/Fry House pre-1738 Longley/Wheeler House ca. 1808 John Fry House ca. 1757 Fry/Wheeler House 1810 Percy Phinney House 1885 Coolidge/Burnham House 1822 Clifford Walcott House 1872 Capt. Amory Pollard House ca. 1811 Nathan Brooks House ca. 1830 Europe Wetherbee House ca. 1835 Moses Howe House ca. 1840 Rankin/Glynn/Cochrane Farm ca. 1866 T. Flanagan House 3rd quarter, 19th C. Benjamin Billings House mid-19th C. Houghton House ca. 1720 Capt. Jonas Houghton House ca. 1760 L. Nourse House ca. 1845-50 Reuben Whitcomb Hse./W. Bare Hill School 1880 B Atherton/Jewett Farm ca. 1770 Charles Workman House ca. 1850 Willis/Johnson House 1823-1831 James Houghton House 1789-90 James Keyes House ca. 1728 Old Settler's Tomb 18th C. Osborne/Whitcomb House: Long Hill Farm ca. 1815 Bacon/Bagley/Dakin House ca. 1785 Benjamin Wood Farm 1874 Edwin A. Whitcomb House 1827-30 Abraham Wilder House 1827-30 Moses Wilder House ca. 1795 Whitcomb Lime Quarry mid-18th C. Samuel Baker/Benjamin Sawyer House ca. 1750 John Sawyer House ca. 1827 Hildreth/Whitney House ca. 1828 Patrick/Brown House ca. 1840 Miles/Whitcomb/Taylor House ca. 1805 Moore/Woodbury/Newton House ca. 1800 Miles/Caswell Shop ca. 1805 Oaks/Osborne House pre-1768 Joel and Joab Barnard House ca. 1818 Henry Wood House ca. 1860's Brooks House ca. 1870s B Josiah Goss House early 19th C. D.J. Nourse House early 20th C. Moore House ca. 1800 Greenleaf House ca.1814 Asa Holman House 1800-1825 Hammond House 1876 Frederick Wheeler House ca. 1869 Joseph Randall House ca. 1810 Charles White House mid-19th C. Houghton/Sampson House ca. 1835 Haynes/Wheeler House ca. 1790 Houghton/Hastings/Sawyer Farm pre-1773/ca. 1839 Stephen Pope/Joseph Holder House ca. 1809 Philip Coolidge/David Holder House ca. 1760 Wheeler/Jacobs House ca. 1850 Caro Newton House early 19th C. N.A. Newton House 1870-75 Whitney/Nourse House ca. 1810-25 Whitney tenant house ca. 1860 Sawyer/Haynes House ca. 1735 Francis & Silas Haynes, Jr. House ca. 1815-20 Whitcomb Garrison site 1680-81 J P Houghton House 1795 David and Abel Whitcomb House ca. 1730 Joshua Sawyer House ca. 1810 Reuben Wetherbee House ca. 1855 Joel Whitcomb House 1792 Richard Whitcomb 1791 Asa Whitcomb House late 18th C. Col. Robert Longley House ca. 1756 Nourse/Robinson House ca. 1815 Jonas Houghton House ca. 1785-1815 Dr. Barrows House ca. 1895 William Fyfe House ca. 1740 Bolton Historical Commission ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ HISTORICAL NARRATIVE - Bolton, Mass. once part of Lancaster Explain the history of the structure, and how it relates to the development of the community The Whitcomb lime quarry, said to be the first true industry in Bolton, is also believed to be the second lime-quarrying operation in New England. Extracting and manufacturing lime, which was in high demand for both mortar and plaster, was a Whitcomb family business for over a hundred years, at one time in the eighteenth century exceeding in both quantity and quality the output of any other lime quarry in eastern Massachusetts. The exact date of its establishment is uncertain, however. The first owner to work it, probably beginning in the 1730's, is believed to have been John Whitcomb (spelled "Whetcomb" at that time). This John Whitcomb (1712-1785) was of the fourth generation in Bolton, son of John and Rebecca Wilder Whetcomb). He later became one of Bolton's most illustrious patriots, fighting in both the French and Indian Wars and the Revolution, during which, having been commissioned with the rank of General, he commanded part of the battle line at the Battle of Bunker Hill. He had three sons, Jonathan, John, and Asa. John, Jr. moved to Templeton, and Jonathan and Asa worked the quarry with their father, eventually inheriting it jointly after Gen. John died in 1785. Asa died early, however, at the age of 40 in 1806. His widow, Sarah, inherited his share with their six young children. Jonathan bought out the interests of five of the children, but Sarah retained hers, even after she remarried. She and her second husband, Stephen Brooks, held a life lease on the quarry, and later her daughter, Betsy Whitcomb Reed, had a claim on the title. Maps from the 1790's through 1857 show the lime kiln, although it disappears from maps by 1870. The map of 1794 also shows the "lime house" that was used for storage and probably some of the slaking that was necessary for processing the lime. It may also have been in that structure that the rocks were ground, utilizing water power from the Great Brook. The 1794 map also shows the small eighteenth- century fulling mill, also owned by the Whitcomb family, that stood further east on the brook. While Jonathan's son, Edwin A. Whitcomb (see Form #58--175 Main Street/Great Road), ran the quarry in the third generation, his half-brother, Luke Whitcomb, was also closely involved, apparently in charge of the burning of the lime, as well as the agent for selling it (see Form #149--96 Long Hill Road). After their father's death, Luke made a formal contract with Edwin for the right to burn several "kilns" of lime, and to keep the proceeds. (The firing of the kiln involved a two-week-long burning of charcoal mixed with the limestone rocks.) There must have been some disagreement between the brothers, as a group of local mediators eventually made a finding in Luke's favor, giving him the right to burn six, rather than five, kilns of lime. Other family members, related both by blood and by marriage, also appear to have been connected with the business in various capacities. Among them may have been Ephraim Osborne, earlier of 96 Long Hill Road, and Nathan Brooks, (apparently Stephen Brooks' son), who had married Ephraim Osborne's daughter, Mary, and owned the house nearby at 3 East End Road (see Form #119). In 1831, Moses and Abraham Wilder of 185 and 179 Main Street (see Forms 59 and 60) also subleased at least a few kilns- worth of lime from Luke Whitcomb. According to Town Historian Esther Whitcomb, all the shareholders in the lime quarry sold the business soon after Jonathan Whitcomb's death in 1830. She also says that under its new owners, water was struck at the bottom, flooding the quarry, putting an end to quarrying there for over a century. Other records show that the business was carried on by the partnership of Priest & Houghton into the 1860's, when work was stopped due to increased taxes and the Civil War, and the quarry gradually filled with water. By that time the widespread de-foresting of the Bolton landscape was also making charcoal scarce, and large lime quarries that had been operating in Maine since the 1840's were offering insurmountable competition to Massachusetts lime production. The Whitcomb quarry was finally re-opened under a Somerville company in the late 1930's for the manufacture of agricultural lime, but only operated for a short time. When the Whitcomb heirs sold the lime quarry business after Jonathan Whitcomb's death, Edwin Whitcomb retained possession of the land itself, apparently until his death in 1872. Isaac Wilder of 185 Main Street acquired it after that, from which time its ownership ran with the property at 185 Main (see Form #60). In 1945, 185 Main Street, which still included "the lime quarry pasture", was purchased by Joseph and Gertrude Anderson, who owned it through the middle of this century. In 1976, Mrs. Anderson sold the entire property to the Bolton Conservation Trust. Under a cooperative project of the Bolton Conservation Commission, Conservation Trust, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the lime quarry portion became Bolton conservation land, and the Trust divided out 1.5 acres for the house at 185 Main Street, and sold that portion back into private ownership. All the rest of the property became Bolton conservation land, and was laid out with trails to the various natural and engineering sites. The latter include the quarry, the lime kiln, fieldstone walls and areas where fieldstone appears to have been quarried, and what is labeled as a mill site, (although the fulling mill was located much further east on the brook). The lime kiln was restored in 1976 with funds from a state bicentennial grant and the efforts of many townspeople. BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES Maps and atlases: 1794; 1831; 1857; 1870 (EAW). Whitcomb, E. About Bolton, 1988. Bolton Vital Records; cemetery records. [X] Recommended for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. If checked, you must attach completed National Register Criteria Statement form is attached. http://www.townofbolton.com/hist/survey/whitcomquarry.htm Bolton, Massachusetts Town History Originally part of Lancaster (which was incorporated as a plantation in 1653), Bolton was set off as a separate town in 1738. The History of Bolton Massachusetts The history provided here is taken from the 1988 Historical Properties Survey prepared for the Bolton Historical Commission by Anne McCarthy Forbes, Preservation Consultant. That work was, in turn, based on an earlier inventory of properties prepared by Esther K. Whitcomb. The article index shown below provides quick links to each topic within the article. Each heading within the article provides a "article index" link to return to the index. Article Index (Top of Page) Introduction Contact and Plantation Periods (1500-1675) First Settlement Period (1676-1738) Colonial Period (1739-1775) Federal Period (1776-1830) Early Industrial Period (1831-1872) Late Industrial Period (1873-1914) Early Modern Period (1915-1945) Late Modern Period (1945-present) Introduction The town of Bolton, one of the many communities that has evolved over the past three and a half centuries from the large Lancaster purchase of 1643, is located at the eastern edge of Worcester county, twenty kilometers (12.4 miles) northeast of Worcester. The Nashua River forms part of the town's western boundary, and its territory is traversed by four regional present-day transportation routes: Route 117 (Main Street/Great Road) passes east/west through the center of the town, Route 110 (Still River Road) is oriented north/south at the northwest edge, Route 85 (Hudson Road) leads southeast to Marlborough through Hudson at the southeast quadrant, and Interstate Route 495, with one interchange at Route 117, slices north-south just east of Bolton center. For most of its historical existence Bolton has been a rural community--consisting meadows, woods, and grazing lands on Lancaster's outlying territory in the seventeenth century, subsistence farms in the eighteenth, dairy farms and orchards in the nineteenth, and a diverse culture of orcharding, dairying, poultry-raising, and market-gardening in the first half of the twentieth century. Today its remaining agricultural base has been greatly reduced, and the town has been transformed into a largely residential community of handsome single-family houses, most on large lots, providing homes for people who work outside the town's borders. This change in function, however, and its accompanying increase in population, has made the preservation of the town's rural character and the unique and fragile mixture of its historic resources ever more valuable to its citizens. The extensive documentation in the present Survey of Historic, Architectural, and Cultural Resources, which documents buildings, structures, areas, landscapes, objects, and sites over fifty years old throughout the town, and of which this developmental history is a part, should play a valuable role in the recognition, preservation, and appreciation of those resources. Topography Bolton's varied topography of rolling hills and gently sloping valleys has been one of its primary attractions for centuries. As part of the eastern edge of the central uplands section of Massachusetts (also known as the Worcester plateau), the elevation of the town ranges from 250 feet above sea level in the Nashua valley in the northwest section of town to 600 feet along the Wataquadoc ridge in the central portion. The central high point marks the division between two watershseds. To its west, all the town's streams descend to the Nashua River, which flows through the northwest corner of Bolton as it passes from Lancaster into Harvard. The streams in the east part of town are part of the Assabet River watershed. Historically, Bolton's lack of significant water power limited its manufacturing potential, and most of the town's early industrial activity was limited to small mills on the local streams, and their capacity to products and services for a local and a limited regional market. Several small natural ponds--West's and Little Ponds in the east part of town, and Welsh pond in the southwest-- have traditionally been the source of fishing and recreational activities, however. Bolton is noted for the variety of rocks and minerals found within its borders. In both its natural deposits and its historic stone structures it marks a visible transition between the largely crystalline granitic rock that is the bedrock most characteristic of the region to its east, and the crystalline slate-like rocks of the Nashua Valley region. Both types are visible in the foundations, stone walls or "fences", and engineering sites throughout the town-- the eastern granite obvious in the more rounded rocks, the western slate-like stone in the flatter, more jagged pieces that are stacked in the high drylaid walls of engineering structures, and used as ceiling slabs and lintels over doorways. Characteristically, the soils, which derive from the underlying bedrock, are largely of the sandy, loose, stony Gloucester type in the eastern sections of the town, with Bernardston soils derived from the slate- like bedrock at the northwest. While granite or slate quarries were founded in adjoining towns, Bolton's main marketed mineral resource was the lime from the high-quality limestone deposits discovered by the 1730's in the northeast part of town near Rattlesnake Hill. Lime was quarried, fired, and and processed there by members of the Whitcomb family for over a hundred years. As the glaciers that covered central Massachusetts during the ice age receded, deposits of glacial till formed Bolton's many drumlins, some of which, such as the five that make up Long Hill, were deposited in clusters. The large glacial lake that formed in the Nashua valley left behind fine-grained sediments that made for valuable agricultural land, later enriched by alluvial deposits from the Nashua River that still wash over the corn- and hay-growing river plains in the northwest section of town. (For a detailed discussion of Bolton's geology, see Preservation Plan for the Town of Bolton, 1998, by Alfred J. Lima.) Political Boundaries The territory within Bolton covers just under twenty square miles. Progressing clockwise from the north, it is bounded by the towns of Harvard, two Middlesex County towns--Stow and Hudson--Berlin, Clinton at the southwest corner, and Lancaster to the west. Originally part of Lancaster (which was incorporated as a plantation in 1653), Bolton was set off as a separate town in 1738. Part of the south section was divided out for the district of Berlin in 1784. A small section of Marlborough was annexed in 1829, with bounds established in 1838. The southeast corner of town was later incorporated into the new town of Hudson, however, in 1868. Contact and Plantation Periods (1500 - 1675) (article index) Transportation Routes Partly because no major river completely transected the Worcester plateau, the important native corridors in this part of central Massachusetts followed overland routes. The primary east-west paths roughly followed today's Long Hill Road to Main Street to Wilder Road. An alternate native route traversed Wataquadoc Hill via Old Bay Road. A north-south route through Bolton followed the Still River, probably along the line of Still River Road or slightly to its west. Early travel by English trappers and traders utilized the native trails. Travel through the Bolton area was more frequent after 1636, when there was increased overland movement between Massachusetts Bay and the settlements of the Connecticut River valley. In 1648 the northern alternate to the earlier Boston to Springfield route was in use through the Lancaster territory as the third major colonial roadway of the Plantation Period, involving both the Old Bay and Main Street sections of what had come to be known as the "Bay Path." A short time later, in 1656, the Massachusetts Bay Colony laid out the Concord/Lancaster Road along the existing north branch of the Bay Path that traversed the north side of Wataquadoc Hill. The earliest route laid out by the Lancaster proprietors through Bolton was probably the way north to the "plumtrees and Groten" that followed the east side of the Nashua River. It was later relocated a short distance to the east to higher ground along the general line of Still River Road/Route 110, where it was officially laid out in 1674. Settlement Pattern and Population The territory now encompassed by Bolton was located just east of the Nashua River from some permanent camps of the Nashua (Nashaway) group of Nipmucks located in Lancaster and Sterling, and it is therefore unlikely that there were any substantial camps within Bolton's present borders. Early native fishing sites within Bolton are likely to have been located at the ponds, and it is most likely that any camps associated with fishing, hunting, or gathering, were small, and of short duration. During the seventeenth century, epidemics decimated the Indian population, and regional tribal wars killed many of their people. In 1643, the regional tribal leader, Sachem Solan, sold what was later established by the General Court as the 10- by 8-mile Nashaway Plantation grant to the English, and most of the remaining Nashaways withdrew to the west. The Nashaway Plantation represents the first land granted by the General Court in the central Massachusetts region. With the same boundaries, it was incorporated as the town of Lancaster in 1653. The first English settlers made their homes in the clustered village at Lancaster "old common". Gradually, the outlying parts of the town, which included the territory of Bolton, were divided into privately-owned parcels in the second (1659), third, and later divisions of Lancaster lands, but only a few hardy farmers built houses on them. There are references to a road by Abraham Joslin's house on the west side of Long Hill in 1670, for instance, and to Ens. John Moore's house east of Wataquadoc by 1665. Some English farmers certainly utilized meadows and pastures in Bolton, and would have entered the territory for hunting, mowing, and other transient activities. In general, however, the region as a whole attracted only a small number of settlers during the period, with Lancaster holding only fifty families by 1676. Then, after a period of increasing unrest between the settlers and the Indians, King Philip's War broke out in 1675. The English village at the center of Lancaster was destroyed, and settlers there were massacred or captured. The colonists abandoned the town entirely for several years. First Settlement Period (1676 - 1738) (article index) Transportation Routes This period saw the continued improvement of the major native routes, with the northeast branch of the Bay Path leading through Stow and Concord toward Boston as the Lancaster Road, and the south branch southeast to Marlborough and Sudbury usually referred to as the Marlborough Road. In 1691 the Lancaster Road, as the most important through- route of the region, was again laid out by the colony. In 1721 Bare Hill Road was cut through from the north to connect with the Lancaster Road via Green, Golden Run, Sugar, and Burnham Roads, and in 1725 the lower section of Annie Moore Road was laid out. There is some evidence that a road later called "Town House Road", that led north from the Lancaster Road to the intersection of Sugar and Golden Run Roads was in existence by 1732. (This road was discontinued between 1831 and 1857. Its northern section has recently been re-opened as a new town road). Population and Settlement Pattern After King Philip's War, English settlers slowly returned to Lancaster. Supposedly in the belief that a dispersed settlement would fare better in Indian attack than a clustered village, a few hardy second- and third-generation farmers and their families established homesteads on their outlying lands in Bolton, especially along the east side of the Wataquadoc range and in the northeast part of town. Josiah Whetcomb, for instance, who with his family owned all the northeast quadrant of modern-day Bolton, built his house at the intersection of today's Sugar and Golden Run Roads in 1680-81, where the first child whose birth is recorded in the Bolton territory, his son, Hezekiah, was born in 1681. (See Form #935). Other late-seventeenth-century families who settled here include Beamans, Moors, Snows, Wests, Wilders, and Wilsons. In 1692, in an attempt to keep population in the frontier towns, the legislature passed an act forbidding inhabitants of a community from moving away. In fact, life in the Lancaster area was still dangerous, with isolated Indian raids a constant fear. In 1692, Lancaster designated several houses as garrisons, where settlers were to retreat in the threat of attack. Two are believed to have been located within the borders of Bolton--the garrison of Lt. Thomas Wilder and John Hinds near the center and north part of Wataquadoc, and east of Wataquadoc the house of the less fortunate Ensign John Moore, who was later killed by Indians in 1702. By 1700 there was also some settlement by the Houghton family in north central Bolton. When garrisons were again designated during Queen Anne's War in 1704, settlement within Bolton had increased enough to require three garrisons. By then members of the Houghton family had built houses on their large landholdings in the north central part of the territory in the vicinity of Bare Hill Road. Two houses, the garrisons of John and Jonathan Moore in the southeast, and of Gamaliel Beaman on the east slope of Wataquadoc, are gone, but the foundation of the third garrison, the house of Josiah Whetcomb (Whitcomb), remains. By 1711, when the last group of garrisons was designated for Lancaster, twelve of the twenty-seven were located within Bolton territory, where the population had reached 146, nearly a third of the total of 458 for the whole of the Lancaster territory. In 1706, the inhabitants of Lancaster east of the Nashua River drew up their first petition to be set off as a separate town. Among the reasons they cited was the usual difficulty of getting to the meetinghouse on the Sabbath, but also mentioned was their concern for the upkeep of the eight bridges that by then had been built over the Nashua River and its wetlands. That petition was denied, but as the perceived threat of Indian attack subsided with the 1713 Peace of Utrecht, farmers from Lancaster and beyond began to settle outlying areas with increasing frequency. By 1730 efforts to set up new towns had again intensified, and in 1732 the town of Harvard was incorporated in what had been the northeast section of Lancaster. Finally, in 1738, a petition from the residents in the east and southeast part was granted, and the town of Bolton, including much of present-day Berlin and part of Hudson, was incorporated as a new community of thirty-five square miles, named in honor of the Duke of Bolton, England. Subsistence Pattern/Economic Base In a pattern that characterized most of New England in the colonial period, the early residents of Bolton were virtually all farmers, practicing a subsistence type of agriculture of mixed grain raising and animal husbandry. Upland, meadow, and grass lands were still highly prized, and orchard culture, with a few small cider mills to process apples into cider, the most important colonial drink, were in existence before 1740. With one possible exception, industry in Bolton during this period was all for a relatively local market. The first mill in town, a sawmill or gristmill run by members of the Sawyer family on Wataquadoc Brook near Pine Hill, was in existence by about 1700; the millpond of its successors, Thomas Sawyer's sawmill and gristmill, was created when the mills on Century Mill Road were built in about 1739. (See Forms #143 and Area Form E). Bolton's most significant regional colonial enterprise was probably in operation before the town was incorporated, by the early 1730's. Limestone deposits had been discovered on Whitcomb family land at the east end of town several years earlier, but it is believed that limestone was first quarried and turned into lime in the 1730's at the second lime quarry in New England, the Whitcomb Lime Quarry (see Form #927) by John Whitcomb (later Gen. Whitcomb). Inns and taverns were part of the local scene as early as 1717-18, when David Whetcomb (Whitcomb), one of the sons of Josiah, opened one in his house at 43 Old Sugar Road (#107). He had married the widow Mary Fairbank, whose husband and two children had been killed in a 1697 Indian raid. Although her life had been spared, she had been captured, and during her two-years' captivity in Canada she had gained knowledge of the use of roots and herbs in medicine. Upon her release and her marriage to David Whetcomb in about 1700, she became known as "Doctress" Mary, the first doctor in Bolton, and the only physician in the area closer than Concord. Architecture The oldest extant house in Bolton is the David Whitcomb Inn at 43 Sugar Road (#107), built about 1700, and said to be similar in design and proportion to the house of his father, Josiah (see Whitcomb Garrison Site, #935). Authentically restored in the mid-twentieth century, it is also Bolton's only remaining example of a center-chimney, 2 1/2-story saltbox with a rear leanto. There are apparently two 2 1/2-story half-houses extant from this period: 48 Hudson Road (the Kimmens/Whitcomb House, ca. 1730--#153), and part of the house at 283 Berlin Road (#131), probably built for Deacon Jabez Fairbank in the 1720's. Bolton is fortunate to have several examples of center-chimney, 2 1/2-story, five-bay houses from this period, although some may have attained that form as a result of later expansions. In the latter group are the ca. 1720 Houghton House at 159 Golden Run Road (#155), the James Keyes House at 258 Hudson Road (#145), the Jonathan Moore House at 211 West Berlin Road (#175), and the house of David Whitcomb, Jr. at 496 Sugar Road (#108), now without its center chimney. In spite of later alterations and expansions, another inn, the Josiah Richardson House (later the Wilder Mansion), at 101 Wilder Road, is the only representative in Bolton of an early Georgian hip-roofed, 2 1/2-story house (#179). Both the ca. 1730's Whitcomb Lime Quarry and its associated stone Lime Kiln (#927 and 928) are today protected on town conservation land, and frequently visited as colonial engineering site unique within the region. One burial structure, called locally the "Old Settlers' Tomb, (#929), located off Long Hill Road, is a rare surviving example of a "Corn Hill" type of underground stone tomb that dates to about 1700. Colonial Period (1739 - 1775) (article index) Transportation Routes Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Lancaster Road became of increasing importance as the main route west from Concord to Lancaster and the growing regional center at Worcester. Its section through Bolton, the northeast branch of the old Bay Path, was improved at intervals in an attempt to address problems at its many wetlands crossings and to maintain the standard of making it "so feasible as to carry, with four oxen, four barrels of cider at once." As the town grew, the Selectmen were continually asked to lay out new roads to provide access to various parts of town, and to ease transportation to neighboring communities. A few local roads were established between dispersed farms, and connections with neighboring towns were made via the establishment of South Bolton Road and Berlin Road to the south, and Harvard and East End roads to the north. Population In 1741, eleven members were released from the Lancaster Church to form a new parish in Bolton, and the first minister, the Rev. Thomas Goss, was called to lead the new community. While few population figures are available for the time, the town apparently grew slowly but steadily over the middle of the eighteenth century from about 250 people in 1738 to 925 in 1765. In addition to those who worshiped at the town church, a few Quakers were registered (as was required by law) as living in the town as early as 1742. A small community of Friends, members of the Salem monthly meeting, expanded through the third quarter of the eighteenth century, and by the early 1770's they had established a cluster of homes at "Fryville" near what is now the Berlin border, with their own meetinghouse and small burying ground. The Quaker meetinghouse is gone, but the burying ground remains, now called the Old Fry Burial Ground (#805) after the community's major leader, John Fry. By the end of the period a few Bolton residents were Baptists, worshipping outside the town borders with the Still River (Harvard) or Northborough groups. Toward the end of the period, Bolton was the scene of one of the region's earliest and most divisive disputes over ministerial authority, which resulted in the dismissal of the Rev. Goss in 1771. The majority in the town church chose a new minister, the Rev. John Walley. From 1771 to 1782, however, a significant minority of the members who remained loyal to Mr. Goss continued to meet for worship at his house at 752 Main Street (#1--NRDIS). The first three and a half decades of the town corresponded with a period of intense political unrest in the colonies. Although records for Bolton are scant, it appears that nearly every farm family sent someone to fight in the French and Indian Wars of 1757-1763. Perhaps Bolton's most illustrious colonial patriot, John Whitcomb, had the rank of Lieutenant as early as 1748, when he was sent with troops from Lancaster in pursuit of a party of murderous "savages" fleeing for Canada. A Lieutenant-Colonel by 1755, he saw action at Crown Point, Lake George, and Ticonderoga. In the early 1770's he was a full Colonel in the Lancaster Minutemen, and in 1775, after the Provincial Congress organized the militia, he was commissioned one of five Massachusetts Generals. In the early 1770's the town quickly became vehemently anti-British in sentiment, and the 1770 Town Meeting vote to boycott "tea and other British goods" was unanimous. Bolton's few Loyalists may have included the Rev. Goss, and certainly his son, Thomas Goss, Jr., who fled town and later settled in Nova Scotia. Many Bolton families, including Gen. Whitcomb's own, had two or three sons who marched to Concord on April 19, 1775, where they took particular part in pursuing the retreating British forces. Settlement Pattern It took many months for the first Bolton residents to agree on a site for their meetinghouse, but the town church was completed a short distance south of the Lancaster Road in 1740, near today's intersection of Wataquadoc and Manor Roads. That first simple two-story church was framed by Thomas Dick, a carpenter who specialized in the construction of meetinghouses. The site for the town burial ground, today called the Old South Burying Ground (#800) had been chosen and donated in 1739 by William Sawyer, whose grave of 1741 is the earliest there to be marked. While the burial ground was over a half-mile southeast of the meetinghouse, the other earliest town structures were built in a tight cluster around it. Within a few years a fieldstone animal pound (#945) stood just west of the meetinghouse, the first sixteen-foot-square schoolhouse had been built on its south side, and, to the northwest, the house of the minister (1741), later expanded into the large hip-roofed mansion at 752 Main Street (#1--NRDIS), had been built. Later in the century, Bolton acquired one of the earliest fire engines manufactured in the United States, the "Bolton Quickstep", built in the south part of town in 1765. DATE OF INN? By the end of the period, the meetinghouse, pound, school, a few houses, and at least one inn, then belonging to Eliakim Atherton, inn formed a loosely-clustered settlement at the town center flanking the Lancaster Road. Nevertheless, development along the Lancaster Road at the town center progressed slowly, while more and more farmhouses were built on its outskirts, as farms were divided or acquired for the sons and daughters of the town founders. Education was both a continuing priority and a worrisome financial responsibility. By 1757 five small schoolhouses had been built, where school was in session about ten weeks during the year. Economic Base Throughout the Colonial period Bolton's economy continued to be agriculturally-based, with grain cultivation in the meadows, pastures in the uplands, and more land in orchards. The number of local mills increased with the addition of Samuel Baker's sawmill in the east part of town by 1765, and another along Sawmill Brook in the west by 1770, where a gristmill was soon operating, as well. Samuel Baker also established a tannery near his house at 392 Main Street (#34) in the 1750s, which was later carried on by other owners. Also at the east end of town, the Whitcomb lime quarry and kiln continued to turn out high-quality lime for the mortar and plaster that was in great demand for use in many buildings in the Bolton area. With the increase in both population and frequency of travel, more inns and taverns were established. An inn was opened at the west end of town by Josiah Richardson in about 1740, and later carried on by at least one of his brothers, Caleb. (#179--101 Wilder Road). The Abraham Holman Inn (demolished) on the Lancaster Road near the lime quarry was one of the longest-lasting, operating from about 1756 to 1844. The most famous establishment, however, was the Atherton, later the Holman Inn that opened in 1767 on the Lancaster Road opposite the meetinghouse (demolished late 19th century, and one wing moved to 676 Main Street--Form #20--NRDIS.) Architecture The major, and longest-lasting Colonial period house-form in Bolton continued to be the center-chimney, 2 1/2-story house, now either one- or two rooms deep, clad in clapboard and with a five-bay facade. Some pre-1740 buildings may have been expanded to this house-type during this time, as well. Although it has lost its center chimney, the Joseph Sawyer House at 698 Main Street Bolton Center of ca. 1760 (#15--NRDIS) is one of the better illustrations of this type in the town, with a fine Georgian doorway with tapered pilasters, horizontal entablature, and a four-pane transom. The Moore/Fry House at 385 Berlin Road of ca. 1757 (#133) is a well-preserved two-room-deep "double-pile" house. The 1740 Rev. Thomas Goss House at 752 Main Street (#1--NRDIS) was apparently built in this form, but was radically changed at the end of the century (see below.) Several two-room-deep, one-story Cape Cod houses of this period also survive. A few retain their original form; others have been incorporated into larger, later buildings. The best-preserved may be the little Capt. Jonas Houghton, Jr. House of ca. 1760 at 96 Green Road, (#156), which is a three-quarters Cape with a four-bay facade, and has a pair of massive chimneys behind the main roof ridge. Incorporated into the house at 505 Wataquadoc Road is the little William Fyfe House of ca. 1740 (#174), and nearby at 283 Ballville Road is an even smaller Cape, still with its center chimney--the mid-eighteenth-century house of Thaddeus Russel and Jonathan Ball (#324). Aside from the houses that also functioned as inns, no commercial or industrial buildings of this period are known to survive. Some ruins remain from the Baker/Sawyer Sawmill site north of Main Street near 401 Main (#930--see Form #64). Federal Period (1776 - 1830) (article index) Transportation Routes After the Revolution, there were three County roads through Bolton--the Road from Lancaster to Boston (the old Lancaster Road, often locally called simply the "Boston Road", later the Great Road--today's Main Street/Route 117), the Road from Lancaster to Harvard (Still River Road, increasingly called the Groton Road), and Long Hill Road, as the County Road from Bolton to Marlborough. During this period there was a great increase in stagecoach travel, and ever more regular mail service, both of them along the Lancaster to Boston Road, which was the post road through town and to the communities to the west. The third owner of the Holman Inn in the west part of the center, Amory Holman, owned a major stagecoach line, the Boston & Lancaster Line, and later several mail lines. In 1828 an average of forty loaded wagons passed through Bolton per day, carrying 14,000 tons of goods to the Greenfield/Brattleboro area. There was now also a nearly straight north-south route through town along Harvard to Manor and Berlin Roads. One major private road-building project was the Lancaster & Bolton Turnpike, incorporated in 1805 and opened through the west part of town in 1807-08. This was a toll road, owned and built by a group of Lancaster and Bolton businessmen, including Capt. Caleb Moore and Gen. Stephen Gardner. It began at a point on the Lancaster/Boston Road opposite Wilder Road (its tollhouse is still there, at 855 Main Street (#99), traversed the Moore property in front of the Captain's store, then followed lower Sampson Road and the new straight roadbed west into Lancaster. Toward the end of the period the line of Main Street was completed in its present course with the construction of the short section between Long Hill and Meadow Roads. Population In 1776 Bolton had 1210 inhabitants. In 1784, however, the District of Berlin was formed with about eighty families, incorporating much of the south section of town, Bolton's former "south parish". As a result, the population of Bolton in 1790 dipped to 861. The greatest growth during the period was between 1810 and 1820, when the population increased by 192 to reach 1,229 in 1820. There was significant population growth in the south part of Bolton, where the Quaker community, one of only a few in central and eastern Massachusetts, had become large enough to build a second, two-story meetinghouse in 1795, and to become a monthly meeting of the Society of Friends in 1798, when 130 members, in twenty-two families, were listed. A Quaker school was built near the meetinghouse by 1788. Subject to town regulations, it was paid for and supported by the Friends. In 1823, a private preparatory school, the Fry School, was established by Thomas Fry, and operated until 1845. Religion The town had also outgrown its own meetinghouse, and in 1793 the simple old building off Main and Wataquadoc was replaced with a second town church, with steeple and belltower, on the north side of Main further east in the center. The rift in the congregation was resolved in 1783, with the drawing up of a new Church Covenant that was signed by both "Gossites" and "Walleyites", in which they agreed to again "walk together as Christians." They were further united under a new minister, the Rev. Phineas Wright, who came to Bolton that year, and built a new parsonage, at 763 Main Street (#95--NRDIS). Theological disagreement was not absent for long, however, as Bolton, like many other Massachusetts communities, was torn between Congregationalism and Unitarianism in the early nineteenth century. The town parish gradually turned Unitarian, leaving those with "orthodox" views without a place of worship in Bolton. Finally, in 1828, Bolton's great "country squire" of the period, Sampson Wilder, led efforts to form a local Congregational society, and largely financed the building of an octagonal church, the Hillside Church, on his own property on Wilder Road later that year. Its congregation, though always small, attracted members from all the nearby communities as well as Bolton. Also in 1828, a small Baptist Society was organized in Bolton with sixteen members. In the early nineteenth century the Old South Burying Ground was nearing capacity, and in 1822 the town purchased two small lots, one in the east part of town, one in the west, which were developed that year as the Pan Burying Ground (#801) and the West Burying Ground (#802). From that time on, most burials in Bolton were regionally-based, with lots being bought by families from the section of town where the burial ground was located. Military/Political Although Bolton's role in the Revolution is less well-documented than that of many other communities, it is clear that the townsmen remained fiercely patriotic. Many townsmen performed military service in three local military companies and later in the continental forces. They included a "negro servant named York", who did "a turn for Bolton" in the Continental Army in 1777, although Joseph How and Eliakim Atherton received his military pay. A liberty pole was erected at the town center. At the third Provincial Congress in June of 1775, Col. John Whitcomb was elected the first Major-General of the Massachusetts Army, and in that capacity he led part of the battle line at Lechmere Point at the battle of Bunker Hill. In 1776 he was commissioned a Brigadier-General in the Continental Army, but refused a subsequent request by Washington that would have put him in command of all the forces in Massachusetts. Although Bolton was an agricultural community, and many of the town farmers must have had sympathies with Shays' Rebellion of 1786-87, it is ironic that a Bolton company of forty-five men was sent to guard the Worcester courthouse at the height of the conflict. Only one Bolton farmer, Uriah Moore, is known to have marched to Worcester with Daniel Shays' rebels. The War of 1812, and the embargos associated with it, were unpopular with Bolton residents, as they were in many Massachusetts communities. The town drew up a petition requesting the President to suspend the 1807 embargo, citing the "stagnation of business" they were suffering, and later another stating that they considered the war "more calamitous and destructive to ourselves . . . than any enemy there is to contend with." Only five or six Bolton men are known to have served in the war. Local military companies, an outgrowth of the pre-Revolutionary town-maintained militias, were supported by Massachusetts communities for several decades into the nineteenth century. A state statute still mandated military training for all able-bodied men, but the annual May training and fall Muster Days became increasingly social occasions (at times little more than drunken brawls enhanced by weapons) rather than serious military exercises. Bolton had two companies of about a hundred men each, the Bolton Rifles and the Bolton Militia, both part of the larger Lancaster Regiment. The greatest honor for the Militia was forming the guard for the Marquis de Lafayette when he dined at the Abraham Holman Inn and stayed overnight at the Wilder Mansion on his 1824 tour of New England, after which the militia changed its name, to the Lafayette Guards. The powder and ammunition for the military companies for years had been kept in the meetinghouse--at one time under the pulpit, and later in the attic. Finally, in 1812, a safer alternative shelter was built for them--the little Bolton Powderhouse, (#913-NRDIS) which still stands well away from any building on the hill behind the site of the second meetinghouse. Societies and Organizations Books were becoming more available over the first third of the nineteenth century. As people even in rural communities recognized that "reading maketh a full man," a regional Social Library was formed in 1791 with members from Bolton, Stow, and Berlin. After several years it was divided, and members in Bolton formed their own Social Library in 1800. Settlement Pattern Although building was slow during the recession of the 1780's, by 1800 Bolton was rapidly developing into a prosperous agricultural town of dispersed farms, with a growing center village along the main transportation route, and many large, high-style residences that reflected the good fortune of at least some of the inhabitants. While the greatest residential concentration was now at the center, secondary villages developed in this period in the south at Fryville around the Quaker meetinghouse, and east of the center along the Boston Road in the area called "the Pan." Around the turn of the nineteenth century small country stores were opened in all sections of town--some in their proprietors' houses, others in small freestanding buildings. Among them were the store of Jonathan Atherton at his house at 310 Green Road (#158), Col. Asa Whitcomb's, probably in his house at 591 Sugar Road (#114), Stephen Gardner's at 642 Great Road from at least 1793 to 1805 (#25--NRDIS), one at Fryville opposite 401 Berlin Road (in a deteriorated building which may still be standing--Form #134), and the longest-operating rural store, built by Col. Caleb Moore near the head of the Turnpike at 41 Wilder Road (#177). The largest of the stores, built of brick in about 1820, is still called "the old Brick Store", and is located at 718 Main Street, at the center (#9--NRDIS.) In the early 1790's, as it shifted to the school-squadron system, (the forerunner of district schools), the town replaced all five of its schoolhouses with identical buildings, each 18 x 18 feet, with a porch and an eight-foot shed. A Center School, twenty-feet-square, was added, and an additional one, built by the families on Still River and Vaughn Hill Roads, was constructed of brick. The Post Office was established during this period, in 1808. Economic Base In addition to the commercial establishments mentioned above, the Federal period was an active period for artisan and cottage-industry manufacturing, as well as for a few enterprises that had a wider regional impact. Many farmers had sidelines in such agriculturally-oriented activities as blacksmithing, cooperage, cider-making, and the manufacture of wheels, harnesses, and oxbows. By 1794 there were two potash works and one pearlash manufactory in Bolton; ruins from one of the potash works may still be extant in the stone structures near the first meetinghouse site in Bolton center (#946--Area Form J). Around the turn of the nineteenth century some residents were also shoemakers, supplying shoes to itinerant agents who resold them in other parts of the country. By the end of the period both men and women in some families were working on the "putting out" system, whereby they finished shoes from materials provided by larger shoemakers or merchants who marketed them. They often worked in small shoe shops separate from their houses, called "ten-footers"; at least one of these shops may remain in Bolton, as the east end of the little shop of Elcanah Caswell at 443 Main Street on the Pan (#67). Other Federal period home manufacturing in Bolton, as in surrounding communities, involved the making of straw- and palm-leaf hats, (introduced around 1800), and the production of combs, which began in Bolton by 1820. Strawbraiding was largely done at home by women, and gradually died, finally ending as the southern market was eliminated during the Civil War. Comb-making, which required specialized equipment to work the hard animal horn, was done in at least five known freestanding shops by some of Bolton's better-known male entrepreneurs, and often involved several employees. Toward the end of the period it also became increasingly mechanized. Elcanah Caswell, one of several comb-makers on the Pan, even leased space in the Sawyer Gristmill just east of his house, where for a short time he ran the machinery by water power. Other water-powered comb shops were run by two Haynes families and by Asa Holman, whose comb shop still stands on the property at 202 Wataquadoc Road (#308--Area Form L). The Haynes shop at 49 Sawyer Road (#171) may have used horn that came from the family's own slaughterhouse. The Haynes/Houghton comb shop on Still River Road (see Forms #161 and 162), was probably the largest in Bolton--three stories high, with several employees. Several larger and more lucrative manufacturing enterprises also operated in Bolton during this period. After Gen. John Whitcomb died in 1785 the Whitcomb Lime Quarry was operated largely by his son, Jonathan, until his death in 1830, and with the regional building boom in the early nineteenth century, its lime was probably more in demand than ever. A fulling mill, apparently also run by members of the Whitcomb family, was standing by 1794 on the Great Brook east of the lime kiln, behind the Gen. Whitcomb Homestead. For over thirty years high-quality beaver hats (later silk) were being produced by the Blood family on Main Street. While the Baker tannery seems to have closed down, two more tanneries were established, one just west of the center in 1776 by Simeon Hemenway at the base of Harvard Road, and another by Josiah Babcock in 1802 on Berlin Road. Sawmills and gristmills continued in operation during the period on Century Mill Road (where Capt. Amory Pollard took over the old Sawyer operations), and at the town's "east end", where in the 1790's Benjamin Sawyer had acquired the former Baker sawmill, and added a gristmill as well. In the west part of town, Benjamin Morse was operating a gristmill on Sawmill Brook as early as 1792, and by about 1820 Joel and Joab Barnard had a sawmill, and later a turning lathe, just north of the intersection of today's Main Street and Sampson Road. While only dams and foundations remain from any of the mills, the most visible legacy of Bolton's Federal period industries is in the warm red brick of the many brick buildings that were constructed in town in the early nineteenth century. There were at least four brick-making operations in Bolton between 1790 and 1830 (Bolton was producing 200,000 bricks annually as early as 1793), although two brickyards in the east part of town--Col. Robert Longley's on Sugar Road and Oliver Barrett's on Long Hill Road, may have been fairly small. More significant were the two brickyards off the west side of Still River Road which utilized the rich clay deposits from the alluvial plains of the Nashua and Still Rivers. One, off the northern part of the road, was operated by Dea. Job Howard, and is known to have supplied the bricks for the Still River schoolhouse and the 1812 town powderhouse. The other, a short distance to the south, was operated for at least two generations by Silas Haynes and his sons, on the property associated with their houses at 298 and 304 Still River Road (the latter house is undoubtedly constructed of bricks from their own yard; see #s 162 and 163.) Architecture The Federal era was one of the most active construction periods in Bolton's history, and produced its largest number of high-style buildings, as well as its greatest variety of building forms. Residential: Several regional Federal house-types are represented throughout the town. The lingering five-bay, 2 1/2-story center-chimney house continues throughout the period, including two examples known to have been built in the early 1790's by housewright Joel Whitcomb at 584 and 588 Sugar Road (#s 111 and 112). Several of these display the continuation of Georgian detailing as well as eighteenth-century form--cf. the 1798 Gen. Stephen Gardner House at 642 Main Street (#25--NRDIS), which has an elegantly-proportioned late Georgian entry with tapered pilasters and triangular- pedimented entablature, and the Dr. Amos Parker House, a larger, two-room-deep example at 704 Main Street (#13--NRDIS) of ca. 1800, with 6-over-9-sash windows and an enclosed pedimented, projecting entry "porch." Most significant is the emergence of 2 1/2-story paired-chimney houses, with interior rear chimneys (as exemplified at the house of Nathaniel Longley, Jr., at 313 Berlin Road [#132]), or with interior end chimneys, the latter appearing in hip-roofed houses, such as the Nourse/Robinson House at 28 Vaughn Hill Road (#261), the John Sawyer House of ca. 1827 at 401 Main Street --#64), or the high- style Samuel Blood House of ca. 1793 at 579 Main Street (#69--NRDIS), the only house of the period built with corner pilasters. Two rear-chimney brick examples, one with a hipped roof, one with a side-gabled roof, were built within a few years of each other between 1827 and 1830 at 175 Main Street (the Edwin A. Whitcomb House, #58--hip-roofed), and 179 Main Street (the Abraham Wilder House (#59)--side-gabled). By contrast, Bolton has very few houses that were built with paired ridge chimneys. One rare Federal example is the ca. 1785 house of Bolton's third minister, the Rev. Phineas Wright, at 763 Main Street (#95--NRDIS). The Wright house has a stylish late-Georgian doorway with transom, and fluted pilasters with bolection-like capitals. Cape Cod cottages continue during this period, with several being built between 1780 and 1830. One of the best-preserved is the 1819 house of Asa Wheeler, Jr. at 228 Berlin Road (#128). Along with them are a few examples of their Federal-Period variant, the little one-room-deep story-and- a-half cottage, usually with rear chimneys, and with a high expanse of wall above the facade windows. Most of these have been altered or expanded, but good examples still remain in the Hillside Parsonage at 369 Old Bay Road (#168--possibly enlarged from an earlier building), and at 307 Harvard Road (#253), the Willis/Johnson House, built between 1823 and 1831. One three-quarter Cape that was built in about 1828 at 412 Main Street (#33) was later raised to two stories; another at 121 Burnham Road (#121) was also raised, in 1887. The highlight of Federal period residential construction in Bolton is its collection of four large, relatively high-style, hip-roofed brick farmhouses. All are believed to have been built between 1796 and 1821. Stylistically, the earliest appears to be the house of Ephraim Osborne at 96 Long Hill Road (#149). This is a square, nearly symmetrical house with a pair of massive chimneys and three main facades, each with a central six-panel door set into an arched opening with a semi-circular leaded fanlight. Similar narrow-arched entries with semi-circular fanlights appear across town at Capt. Caleb Moore's House at 52 Wilder Road (#177), which, like those at the Osborne House, are trimmed with reeded wooden moldings. Two hip-roofed brick mansions on Still River Road appear to have been built slightly later, between 1810 and 1821. The house of David Whitney at 138 Still River Road (#161) and the home of Francis and Silas Haynes, Jr. at 304 Still River (#163) each have four corner chimneys, and are constructed in Flemish bond. The Whitney House, the only one to retain a slate roof, has sidelighted entries with wide, leaded elliptical fanlights in its two main facades, and a tall corner wing at the southwest corner. One wood-frame hip-roofed house with four tall corner chimneys was also built, by the carpenter brothers Joel and Joab Barnard, at 962 Main Street (#100), in about 1818. Typical of a rural community, most early houses in Bolton display only modest or vernacular detailing based on the prevailing style of the time. The ca. 1793 Samuel Blood House, however, has corner pilasters and a double-leaf, four-paneled door flanked by pilasters and surmounted by an elliptical fanlight. Some of the most lavish Federal details are found on updated buildings. The 1741 Rev. Goss House was updated in about 1803 with a hipped roof, corner pilasters, and a new high-style north-facing Federal facade with pedimented, pilastered doorway. The Wilder Mansion at 101 Wilder Road (#179) was altered in about 1814-15 with a new high-style doorway that has leaded sidelights in a pattern of diamonds and circles and a wide elliptical fanlight with nine curved divisions. In about 1826 the building was expanded to a French-inspired five-part building with one-story hip-roofed side wings joined to the main house by "hyphens" (one wing has been demolished). Agricultural: Very few of Bolton's early outbuildings survive, and virtually none have documented dates. Still, several side-gabled English barns (with the high wagon door in the long side of the building) may pre-date 1830. Among them are the small barn at 283 Ballville Road (#325--Form 324), the barn at the Barnard House at 962 Main (see Form #100), and the west portion of the large barn at 82 Old Bay Road, #303 (see Form #302). Institutional: None of the schoolhouses and churches built during the Federal period survives in Bolton, although one of the churches, the Second Quaker Meetinghouse of 1795, was moved to Old Sturbridge Village in 1954, where it was restored to its simple two-story, 34 by 28-foot form. The two 1822 burial grounds, however, remain as eloquent repositories of the folk art of the late Federal period, replete with the ubiquitous urn-and-willow adorned slate markers of the era. The little square, windowless powderhouse of 1812 (#913--NRDIS) has recently had its hipped roof restored with wood shingle. Commercial: The little Moore Store at 41 Wilder Road (#177), which apparently began as a small side- gabled one-story building, has lost most of its original appearance through later additions, but the "Old Brick Store" of ca. 1820 at 718 Main Street (#9-NRDIS) is still a well-preserved large two-story, hip-roofed building with a granite-floored "piazza" across the five-bay facade, where the paneled shutters of the windows still bear the words "West India Goods." Industrial: Moses Wilder's Blacksmith Shop, an impressive gable-front stone building of ca. 1802-10 which stood between the two Wilder houses at 179 and 185 Main Street, was also moved to Old Sturbridge Village, in 1957. Early Industrial Period (1831 - 1872) (article index) Transportation Routes The early nineteenth century road network remained in use, with little increase in the number of side roads until the end of the period. The line of Main Street/Route 117, by 1830 increasingly called the Great Road, was heavily traveled as one of the main east/west routes for wagons, coaches, mail, and for cattle and turkey drives to and from summer pastures in north central Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. Traffic and the associated business trade associated with it diminished sharply from the 1840's, however, when regional railroads were built to the west. Their presence led to the closing of the Bolton & Lancaster Turnpike, which was taken by the county as a public road in 1847. In 1854 the Marlborough Branch of the Fitchburg Railroad through Hudson drew off more traffic to the east. In 1866 the Agricultural Branch of the Boston, Clinton & Fitchburg line from Northborough to Sterling was built through the southwest corner of Bolton. In the 1830's most of the present line of Forbush Mill Road was laid out, as an alternative to an earlier road further to the west, and providing access to the new Wilder (later Forbush) Sawmill on Sawmill Brook. Shortly afterward the lower end of Sugar Road was built, connecting the end of Golden Run Road with the Great Road. In 1872 Century Mill Road (originally Walcott Road) was constructed, linking Hudson and South Bolton Roads and providing ready access to the sawmill, grist- and cidermills still operating on the old eighteenth-century Sawyer Mill sites. Population Bolton's population remained relatively unchanged at about 1200 from 1830 to the mid-1850's. In 1855, 8.5% of the 1255 residents were foreign-born. In 1860 the population was 1,348, and in 1865 it had increased to 1802, with the foreign-born population barely increased over a decade to 9%, reflecting Bolton's lack of industrial activity. A significant reduction in population to about 1300 at the end of the period was due largely to the loss of the two-square-mile southeast corner of town to the formation of the town of Hudson in 1868. The Quaker community at Fryville continued to thrive toward the middle of the nineteenth century, and a second Quaker cemetery, the Friends Burying Ground (#803) was opened on Berlin Road in 1844. During this period smallpox was still cause to prevent interment in public burial grounds, and a small family private Smallpox Cemetery (#804) is still in place off Sugar Road, with two burials from 1845. One of the town's most prominent citizens, Edwin A. Whitcomb, the last Whitcomb to own the lime quarry, also died of smallpox, in 1872, and was buried behind the Whitcomb Homestead on the site of today's 149 Main Street. His body was later moved to the Pan Burying Ground. The Unitarian congregation, which had separated from the town as the First Parish Church in the early 1830s, continued to flourish at the center, where it remodeled its sanctuary in 1844, while the little Congregational society at the Hillside Church ceased to function a few years after its main patron, Sampson Wilder, left town permanently in 1845-6. Its last service was held in 1858. The new Baptist Society built a small Greek Revival church, at 9 Wataquadoc Road (#195--NRDIS) in 1841, and replaced it with a larger Italianate one just west of the First Parish Church in 1866. A shortlived Methodist society was formed in 1859, and held well-attended services in the Town House for about two years. Education in Bolton underwent slow reform, with the addition and replacement of schoolhouses through the middle of the century. The town got its first high school, the Houghton School in 1849 (#82--NRDIS at 697 Main Street), with a 2 1/2-story vernacular Greek Revival building on land at the center donated by Joseph Houghton. Within a year after town and church were separated by Massachusetts law in 1833, Bolton built its first small town house, just east of the former meetinghouse on the expanded town common that encircled the church. The building burned in 1852 and was replaced the next year by the present two-story brick Town House at 663 Main Street (#88-NRDIS). The Fire Department was also organized in the middle of the century, and built a firehouse at the center (demolished). The town established a Poor Farm in 1831 on today's Farm Road; its large farmhouse was torn down in the 1920's. 155 men from Bolton served in the Civil War, with twenty-one dying in the conflict. In December of 1866 memorial tablets were placed in the front wall of the Town House, but it was not until 1884 that Bolton's Post 172 of the Grand Army of the Republic was founded. Societies and organizations This was the era of the formation of several other organizations and activities in Bolton. A small Temperance Society was founded in 1834, and a Ladies Sewing Circle in 1845. The Bolton Agricultural and Mechanic Association, later the Bolton Farmers' and Mechanics Association, was formed in 1846. An Anti-Slavery Society was organized sometime before the Civil War, and a local Sons of Temperance chapter was meeting at a private meeting hall, Robinson Hall (664 Main Street, #23--NRDIS) by 1870. The town officially established a Public Library in 1859, with a room in the Town House. In the same year the Bolton Lyceum, later the Union Lyceum, was organized, and was active for about ten years. Settlement Patterns After the spurt of building along the Great Road at the center in the early nineteenth century, the mid-1800s saw the development of a true civic and institutional cluster there, with the construction of the first and second town houses, the first and second Baptist churches, the first firehouse, and the Houghton School. During this period residential construction continued to fill in the open spaces at the center, especially in the east part, between the Gardner and Blood farms. The town overall was still a prosperous, dispersed agricultural community, however, with a slowly increasing number of farms as land was divided out of the older farms for later generations, or sold to a small number of newcomers. With the loss of the southeast corner of town to the formation of Hudson in 1868, the entire south part of Bolton was now entirely agricultural. The source of much local talk was the arrival in the 1860's of the town's first "gentleman farmer" of the late nineteenth-century, Solomon Howe, who spent a leisurely retirement sprucing up the old Wheeler Farm on Wataquadoc Road to raise prize livestock, and even building an observation tower on Old Bay Road. Economic Base Bolton entered the Early Industrial Period with a diverse and promising small-manufacturing base. By the end of the period, however, virtually all the town's enterprises had succumbed to the external forces of industrialization in other nearby communities, and the absence of any railroad through the heart of the town. There was a general increase in the range of small-manufacturing concerns until the middle of the nineteenth century, however, when the value of Bolton's products was a little over $69,000. Sampson Wilder opened a sawmill and shingle mill on his property at the west end of town, apparently converting one of them to a sash-and-blind factory in the mid-1830's, and another sawmill was built by Joel Sawyer on the Great Brook at the center at about the same time. By mid- century, Bolton had added a plow manufactory, harness- and pump-making operations, a small trunk factory, and a shoe-box mill. Cards for nearby textile mills were made at Fryville in the 1830's, and 2000 pairs were sent to the Boston market in 1836. The most ambitious new enterprise in this period was the Bolton Shoe Factory, a joint stock corporation formed in 1837, and later incorporated in 1853 by Gen. Amory Holman and twenty-one other investors, which operated in a three-story shoe shop at 664 Main Street (#23--NRDIS). Although founded at an auspicious time to take advantage of advances in technology and production methods, it was apparently never very successful, and by 1858 it had closed. Regional competition and growing industrialization in communities all around Bolton- -Leominster, Marlborough, Clinton, Hudson and Northborough in particular, also effectively put an end to Bolton's home industries in shoemaking and comb manufacturing. More successful in the early part of the period was Gen. Amory Holman's Bolton & Lancaster Stage Company, to which he added several long-distance mail contracts in 1832. The stage company in turn brought business to the stores and taverns along its route, and especially to Holman's Inn and his ancillary enterprises, which included a blacksmith shop, boarding and livery stable, and harness shop. By the mid-1850's, however, the regional railroads had not only put the stagecoach lines out of business, but the Lancaster & Bolton Turnpike and virtually all the remaining inns in town, as well. (The demise of the inns and taverns had also been facilitated by the Commonwealth's withholding of liquor licenses beginning in 1842). By 1865, the value of Bolton's products had fallen to $27,000, and the only significant manufacturing enterprises that remained were four of the sawmills, (which produced 479,000 board feet of lumber in that year,) Philo Clapp's struggling pump factory near the lime quarry, the box mill, and one minor shoe factory, apparently the shop of Reuben Newton and his sons at 442 Main Street on the Pan (#30), where five or six men were employed. The local brickyards, which had produced 450,000 bricks in 1837, had also closed by that time. By the time the Civil War began, Bolton had essentially returned to a nearly total agricultural economy. With the exception of a brief attempt at silk-raising by several farmers (most of whom seem to have bought unsuitable mulberry trees from Gen. Amory Holman) in the 1830's, (in 1837 Bolton produced only fifty pounds of silk), the town's mid-nineteenth-century farms were fairly prosperous. Orchards were still important, although with the growing temperance movement apples were more likely to be used to make vinegar than cider, and sold for "winter fruit." The growing of corn, hay, potatoes and other crops continued throughout the period; oxen were gradually being replaced by horses as work animals, while the number of sheep in town declined. Bolton had at least twenty-seven acres in cranberry production in the 1850's and 1860's, most of it along the Great Brook east of the center. A small amount of tobacco was raised, which was made into cigars and snuff. This was the period when farmers avidly read the latest agricultural publications, and both gave and attended lectures at the local Farmers' Club, all of which kept them apprised of the latest advances in farm equipment and methods. The greatest agricultural change over mid-century was the shift to dairy farming and to livestock raising on a large scale. 159,742 pounds of dressed beef were produced in Bolton in 1865, along with 65,500 pounds of dressed pork. While no milk production was recorded in 1837, the number of gallons produced in Bolton in 1865 was 481,565. Perhaps the major factor in the switch to dairying was the coming of the regional railroads, on which special milk cars could whisk milk to the large city markets in Boston and Worcester. Farmers could take their milk by wagon to the milk house on the Boston, Clinton, & Fitchburg line at the southeast corner of town, for instance, where it was picked up in the evening, and the empty milk cans returned on the next morning train. Architecture Residential: There was a continuance of the paired end- and rear-chimney house form into the 1830's, and a few more houses, such as the ca. 1835 Europe Wetherbee House at 19 East End Road (#117) were built with paired ridge chimneys. Over the course of the period, the most popular house-type, however, became the gable-front, side-hall, 1 1/2- or 2-story house. Those built before the 1870's all have some vernacular Greek Revival detail, including four-panel doors, echinus moldings and wide cornerboards and friezes--the ca. 1869 Victorian addition to the old Ball House at 283 Ballville Road (#324) exhibits this well. Among the better-preserved earlier examples are the Balcom House at 185 Hudson Road (#146), possibly built as early as the mid-1830s, and the Wheeler/Jacobs House of ca. 1848 at 127 South Bolton Road (#138). An extremely well-preserved pedimented gable-front cottage is the Elizabeth Osborne House in Bolton center, at 749 Main Street (#94--NRDIS), built in 1849. Like several others from the 1840's and early 1850's, it has a recessed entry with full-length, five- pane sidelights. Bolton appears to have had only one true "temple-front" Greek Revival house with a colonnaded facade, the Goss/Grassie House on Old Bay Road, which burned down in the 1880's. Several late versions of the Cape Cod house were constructed during this period, including two twin houses with integral columned facade porches and small pedimented facade dormers that were built in 1830-31 for the two Gardner children at 649 and 655 Main Street (#s 75 and 77--NRDIS). These two also have a hint of Gothic Revival detailing in their pointed-arched gable windows. Good rural examples of late Capes exist in the ca. 1850 Willis/Johnson House at 307 Harvard Road (#253), the house of Moses Howe at 58 East End Road (#116), and the little Caro Newton House at 299 South Bolton Road (#140), which has Bolton's only example of a Greek Revival entry surround with molded boards, cornerblocks, and a central panel over the door. Agricultural: Facilitated partly by changes in the design of farm buildings disseminated in the growing number of agricultural journals of the period, this was the era when farmers in Bolton began to build the "New England" style barns that were to become the dominant barn type through the early years of the twentieth century. These barns were built with the main "great" or wagon door in the gable end--centered on the larger barns, offset to one side of the facade on the smaller ones. While dates for most barns are unrecorded, examples that appear to date to this period include the clapboarded barn with four-sided belvidere at the Wheeler/Jacobs House (#138--127 South Bolton Road) and the barn built with its side into the hill at 683 Main Street (#80--NRDIS) which has a shallow-pedimented wagon door in the side wall facing the street. Institutional: With nearly all its churches and municipal buildings either built or remodeled in the middle of the nineteenth century, Bolton's institutional architecture was predominately Greek Revival in character. The little Baptist Meetinghouse of 1841 at 9 Wataquadoc Road (# 195--NRDIS) has a pedimented gable end and high-style Greek Revival detailing in its entablature and paneled corner pilasters. The Bolton Town House (#78--NRDIS) of 1853, though a fairly plain building, has a tripartite window at the second story of the facade, and retains its double-leaf four-panel door. Commercial and industrial: Only one commercial building is known to remain from this period--the tailor shop of Ebenezer Towne at 711 Main Street (#85--NRDIS), built in 1839 as a tall, narrow pedimented-gable-front building, only one-bay wide. Late Industrial Period (1873 - 1914) (article index) Transportation Routes The earlier road network continued through the turn of the twentieth century. The only significant late-nineteenth-century road construction was the extension of Wataquadoc Road southwest from the point where it had previously ended at West Berlin Road, to join with roads from Lancaster, Clinton center and west Berlin at Ballville in 1868. The lower section of Ballville Road west of its present intersection with Wataquadoc was discontinued a few years later. Rail service continued to be significant during this period, with both profitable and unprofitable results. A group of local investors spent several years building a railroad that ran southwest through Bolton to Hudson from Lancaster, called the Lancaster Railroad. A financial disaster even before it opened in 1873, only one train ever ran over its tracks, but its raised roadbed still winds through Bolton today. The Central Massachusetts division of what was later the Boston & Maine operated over tracks crossing the southeast corner of Bolton beginning in 1881. As with the earlier Agricultural Railroad at Ballville, which became part of the Old Colony Line late in the century, a depot, freight house, and a milk house were built nearby. In 1900 the Clinton & Hudson Street Railway began an electric trolley route through Hudson and Berlin that, although it had no franchise in Bolton, utilized a form of "air rights" by building a high, curved trestle over the B & M railroad tracks just inside the Bolton line. Population A steep drop in population from 1,348 residents in 1860 to only 770 in 1900 probably reflects the loss of territory in the southeast quarter of town to the new town of Hudson in 1868. For the rest of this period of relative stagnation in Bolton, the population remained fairly stable at just under 800 from 1895 to 1915. Statistics from 1875 to 1905 show some influx of foreign-born residents into Bolton, although the proportion was again much lower than in more industrialized communities. In 1875 the foreign-born population included 55 Irish and 13 Canadians; in 1885 there were 48 Irish, 21 Nova Scotians, and 14 Germans; and in 1905 25 Irish, 17 Nova Scotians, and 26 Germans, with small numbers from other groups. Most of the newcomers were farmers, some of whom may first have worked as farm laborers in town before buying their own farms. Others appear to have acquired enough money working elsewhere to purchase farms here outright. Among them were apparently the cluster of Irish families who in the 1880's and 1890's bought some of the old farms in the northeast part of town, including the Glynns, Haggertys, and McCarthys. Longtime twentieth-century farm owners in southeast Bolton were the Bonazzoli family, whose patriarch, Giacomo Bonazzoli, came here from Gottolengo, Italy in 1906, purchasing the old eighteenth-century James Keyes farm at 258 Hudson Road (#145) a year later. Improvements in education led to the phasing out of the district school system, with the consolidation of all the elementary grades by 1896 in three schoolhouses that were moved to the center and combined into a graded school. New organizations continued to proliferate in the late nineteenth century. This was the heyday of temperance societies, and what turned out to be an excessive number of them appeared in Bolton between 1876 and 1889, most of them of quite short active duration. They included the Centennial Temperance Union (founded 1876), the Reform Club, which was active in the mid-1880's, a lodge of the International Order of Good Templars in 1886, the Citizens Temperance Union, and a local chapter of the WCTU, both founded in 1889. More staying power was exhibited by the farmers' organizations. In 1887 a local Grange was formed which was to last for over ninety years. The Farmers and Mechanics Association held its first Cattle Show on the common adjacent to the First Parish Church in 1874, an event which continues today as the Bolton Fair, having been interrupted for only a brief period during World War II. The annual show was so successful that in 1878 the association built a dining hall behind the Town House to accommodate the large crowd that came annually to eat as well as to view the livestock. Between 1874 and 1880 an unusual organization, which sold shares to local sport fishermen, was active--the Bolton Association for the Raising of Fish. The "Fish Association" actually leased the rights to both Little and West's Pond, stocked them with fish, and outlawed fishing there for several years until the fish could reproduce and grow to maturity. The Bolton Improvement Society, its name later changed to the Village Improvement Society, was formed in 1899. Consisting mainly of some of Bolton's more well-to-do citizens, it ran a series of lectures, looked after the condition of roadside trees, lobbied against the growing trend toward large signs and lettering on barns and fences, and took up the cause of bringing electricity to Bolton. Its other major undertaking was Bolton's first "village renewal" and conservation project, in which four of its members bought the rundown mill pond at the center, with its dilapidated sawmill and artisans' shops, and had the buildings torn down. In 1903 the Society hired landscape architect Alfred Stone of Providence to turn the property into a small park, called Pond Park (NRDIS), which is still one of the assets of Bolton center today. There were a number of other projects that added to the quality of life in the town around the turn of the century. Several horse troughs were placed at various locations throughout Bolton, at least two of them the result of donations--a stone-lined one at Pond Park, and a large granite tub at a spring in the bank at the outer west end of Main Street, the gift of Osro Haynes in 1900, that is still in place today (#944). Several substantial memorial gifts were made for building projects, as well. The present Bolton Public Library (#3--NRDIS) was donated in 1903 by Anna and Emma Whitney in memory their father, Capt. Joseph Whitney, and in 1916 Col. Edward Emerson and the heirs of Frederick Felton donated the Colonial Revival portico for the Town House. Settlement Pattern The decline in both population and industry resulted in virtually no overall growth in Bolton during the Late Industrial period. Two late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century trends altered the type of community Bolton had been, however. More and more people were taking summer vacations, and for awhile the main manifestation in town had been the presence of visitors on the farms, where rooms in the old farmhouses were rented to "summer boarders" seeking a wholesome country environment. The owner of the Wilder Mansion in the 1880s, William Moore, actually turned the house into a seasonal hotel, for which he built a large two-story rear wing (later demolished). A few local residents built cabins or fishing shacks on Little and West's Pond, none of which remains. With the nearby access to passenger rail in Hudson, especially after the building of the Massachusetts Central branch in 1881, the woods and open land on lower South Bolton Road gradually acquired a cluster of small summer houses. From the 1890's through the early automobile era, over a dozen cabins and cottages were put up there, most by the interrelated Aymar, Noreau, and Delaney families (see Area Form Q). Even more significant for Bolton's landscape was the growing "rural retreat" movement, in which wealthy city dwellers bought up existing farms as summer and weekend homes, where they indulged in the pursuits of prize cattle-raising, horticulture, riding, and other gentlemanly pastimes. Although Sampson Wilder's vast farm on Wilder Road had been a lavish country seat equal to any standard of the European aristocracy in the early nineteenth century, and Solomon Howe's "gentleman's farm" on Wataquadoc Hill had raised eyebrows in the 1860's, these had been isolated examples in their eras. By the turn of the century, however, nearly a dozen stylish rural retreats, with names like Open View Farm, Mountain View Farm, and Prospect Farm, had been established on large acreages on Bolton's rural hillsides, especially on the east and west slopes of Wataquadoc Hill. They overlooked spectacular vistas west toward the mountains or east to Boston, and their immaculate fields, pastures, and professionally landscaped grounds all had several buildings upon them, usually including a renovated historic farmhouse, state-of-the-art barns, stables, and often a house built expressly for the resident farm manager. Prospect Farm (Area Form M), owned by the Felton family, on the east slope of Wataquadoc, was composed of two adjoining early-nineteenth- century farms, with one of the farmhouses used as a guest house. Two other farms, on Wilder and Vaughn Hill Roads, were both owned by Col. Edward Emerson, who called them Braecroft and Hillcrest. Economic Base There was again considerable growth in agricultural production during the Late Industrial period, due largely to technological improvements and to expanding markets in Boston and in the neighboring manufacturing centers of central Massachusetts. Dairying remained the leading branch of agriculture, accounting for 30 to 35% of the total value of the town's production during the period. The quantity of milk produced increased five-fold between 1875 and and 1885. During the same decade, poultry production more than doubled, to become 10% of the total output of the town. By 1895, however, the town had only a few minor, small-scale industrial enterprises, all of them producing goods and services primarily for the local market. There were three carriage- and wagon-makers and painters, one blacksmith/wheelwright, a gristmill that was about to close, a sawmill, and a cider mill. Several commercial ice houses were built on the larger ponds, two of them by ice companies from Hudson. Architecture Residential: The last quarter of the nineteenth century in Bolton was marked by the near absence of any residential building activity. Only a few late Victorian houses were built, at least half of them to replace earlier ones on the same site. This handful of late-1800s houses are nearly all tall, gable-front two- or three-bay side-hall entry houses with Italianate or Queen Anne detailing and one- or two-story bay windows. A well-preserved Queen Anne house of this type, with two-story polygonal bay windows, patterned shingle, and an open-bracketed porch, is the Proctor/Powers House of the 1890's at 651 Main Street (#76--NRDIS). There are two wide, hip-roofed houses of a simple, Craftsman approach with Colonial Revival detailing in their Tuscan-columned porches, built at 241 Wataquadoc in about 1895 (#311), and at 225 Wilder Road (#273) in about 1910. Agricultural: While New England barns began to appear in Bolton over the middle of the nineteenth century, the majority of the ones remaining in town today appear to have been built after 1870. While they are of various sizes, and some are attached to houses via ells, sheds, or wings in "connected farmhouse" fashion, they share common characteristics that indicate the preferences of both local farmers and builders. Virtually all the barns are "banked" to some degree, built with either the front or one side against a natural hillside, or with a manmade earthen ramp, often supported with a handsome fieldstone retaining wall. Both methods allow for a generous basement story underneath for a pigsty or equipment storage. The large barn at 131 Forbush Mill Road (#272, see Form #131) is one of the few whose construction date is known. Built and christened with a festive barn-raising by Benjamin Billings in 1888, it is clapboarded, with a high fieldstone basement story that has its own sliding vertical-board doors. A high banked ramp supported by a massive fieldstone wall leads to the main vertical-board wagon door, which, typical of the door systems prior to 1890, is mounted on the interior, and has a long multi-pane transom above it. Some Bolton barns of this period are double-ended, with a ramp and wagon door at each gable end, allowing wagons to pass all the way through the barn. The double-ended barn at 610 Sugar Road (#200, see Form #113) is a rare surviving example in which the wagon doorways are of two different heights--the "great doorway" at the west end is high enough to accommodate loaded hay wagons; the exit doorway at the east end is much lower, reflecting the fact that the wagons passing through it would by then have been empty. This barn, like many others, is built of vertical board. Many barns in Bolton have a leanto bay that runs the length of one of the long sides. Usually meant for cattle stalls or stanchions, the leanto often has its own separate front doorway; many of these have the appearance of having been added to the barn after the main part of building was constructed. Silos, which became increasingly associated with dairy farming after about 1880, would once have been a common part of the landscape in Bolton. Only one appears to remain today, a domed, metal-plate silo of the early twentieth century, at the large cupolaed barn at the Moore/Sawyer/Schartner Farm at 211 West Berlin Road (#321, see Area Form N). The prevailing New England barn design continued into the first two decades of the twentieth century in Bolton. These later barns, however, tend to have exterior-mounted vertical-board doors, most of them fitted with one or two fixed 6-pane windows in the door itself, instead of having a transom in the wall above. Institutional: The district schoolhouses were again replaced in the 1870s and 1880s, most with three-bay, gable-front one-story buildings with a double center entry opposite a stove chimney at the rear end of the ridge. Most of those are gone, but the East End School of 1880 still stands at 49 East End Road (#118), later turned 90 degrees and converted to a house. A unique building in the town is the 1903 Bolton Public Library (#3--NRDIS), a low English Revival building of native stone, with a red tile roof designed by Stone, Carpenter and Wilson. Commercial/Industrial: Because of the slowdown in business and industrial activity, there are no known commercial or manufacturing buildings built during the Late Industrial Period. Early Modern Period (1915 - 1945) (article index) Transportation Routes By the 1920's, many existing town roads had been improved for auto traffic by widening and straightening, and were routinely oiled in the summer to keep down the dust. The larger roads were paved by the 1930's. With the advent of the automobile, service ended on the electric trolley line through Hudson and south Bolton in 1924. Gas pumps were seen at several locations in town by the 1930's, even in front of some houses on the Great Road that had been opened for small restaurants or shops. A single-runway airport, the Bolton Airport, opened in the southwest part of town in the mid-1930's. One new side street, Chace Street, was opened at the southwest corner of town in about 1925. Population The population of Bolton remained fairly steady from 1915 (768) to 775 in 1940, with a high of 801 in 1925 and a brief low of 539 in 1935. 1919 marked the end of World War I and the return of the American forces. Thirty-eight men and women from Bolton had served in the war; two had been killed in France. Educational philosophy and organization continued to change. In 1917 the Houghton School became a Junior High School, and high school students attended regional schools in Hudson and Clinton. In 1922-23 Col. Edward Emerson donated Bolton's first true elementary school building to the town, the Emerson School at 50 Mechanic Street (#17--NRDIS), as a memorial to his wife and daughter, who had been killed in the sinking of the Titanic. In 1926 the second Bolton meetinghouse, which had been the First Parish Church for nearly a century, burned down, and was replaced two years later by the present Colonial Revival church (#79--NRDIS). In 1931, in a rare example of a consolidation of disparate religious trends, three religious societies which had been declining in numbers for many years, the First Parish (Unitarian), the Baptists, and the Monthly Meeting of Friends united to form the Federated Church of Bolton/First Parish of Bolton. The 1866 Baptist Church, along with several barns and the line of trees in front of the Pan Burying Ground, was destroyed in the Great Hurricane of 1938. At least one house, on Nourse Road, was later built of "hurricane lumber". With the Baptists by then part of the Federated Church, the church was not rebuilt. Settlement Pattern With the decline and then stabilization in Bolton's population, there was little residential development in town between the two World Wars. Some further summer-cottage and recreational development took place at the two largest ponds and at the small "camp" colony at the foot of South Bolton Road. Bolton is fortunate to have an extremely well-preserved "camp", the Persons Camp of 1919 on Little Pond, that is now owned by the town (#229--see Area Form D). Economic Base Bolton continued to have a primarily agricultural economy through the entire Early Modern period. Its emphasis shifted somewhat, however, with an increase in fruit-growing, more market-gardening, and much more poultry raising, especially during the 1920's, when the number of chickens and turkeys in town doubled between 1920 and 1925. By 1940 the town was producing 83,600 dozen eggs per year. Part of the increase was due to the establishment of at least two very large poultry farms--one at the old Fry Farm at 385 Berlin Road (#133), where a huge multi-story poultry house remains, the other at the former dairy farm at 96 Long Hill Road (#149). Despite a drop in the total number of cows by almost one-half, due to modernized methods milk production actually increased during the period. By 1940, 308 Bolton cows were producing two million pounds of milk annually. Several old farms were converted mainly to orchards during this period, which grew not only apples, but peaches, pears, and quinces. The farmhouse of an old Houghton farm, later Joel Felton's "Valley View Farm" at 92 Wataquadoc Road, burned down in 1928. It was purchased, the house replaced, and a large orchard established by Dr. and Mrs. Roy Clemens, who renamed it "Upland Farm" (see Area Form K). On Wilder Road, the Bolton Fruit Company, whose orchards at the former Reed farm at 76 Wilder Road (Area Form H) were just coming to maturity at the start of the Depression, went out of business, and the property was bought by J.A. Davis & Sons of Sterling, who established their Bolton Orchards there. In 1937, after the burning of two farmhouses at the "East End" on the Great Road (see below), Howard Stephenson bought two adjoining farms which became the foundation for today's Bolton Spring Farm orchards (Area Form C). During the Great Depression, several new types of short-lived business enterprises were undertaken, some of them by entrepreneurs from out of town. A fox farm was established opposite the old Haynes house at 304 Still River Road (#163) from which fox pelts were shipped to New York for the fur trade for a few years. At the east end of town, the old Whitcomb Lime Quarry was reopened to much publicity for the manufacture of agricultural lime by a company from Somerville, but it went out of business within a year. With the increase in recreational automobile travel, several homeowners opened small restaurants and "tea rooms" in some of the old farmhouses along the Great Road, which by the end of the period had become Route 117. One tea room was located in the old Whitney House at 138 Still River Road (#161), two others were opened in the East End, at the huge old Whitcomb family homestead (which burned down in 1936), and at a smaller house to its east, which also burned down. Architecture Residential: Very little residential development took place during this period, and most of the houses that were built were modest in scale. A few Craftsman cottages with Colonial Revival detailing were constructed through the 1920's, some on outlying farms, a few more at the center. 2 Wheeler Road (#356), a well-preserved side-gabled Craftsman cottage, was built in about 1925 on the site of one of Bolton's oldest houses, an early saltbox belonging to the Wheeler family. A few two-story, nearly astylistic gable-front houses were built in the early part of the period, including one by Harry Sutton at 723 Main Street (#193--NRDIS) in about 1918. Chace Street, the period's only new side street (see Area Form O) has one of Bolton's only examples of a little Dutch Colonial Revival house of about 1926, at 2 Chace Street (# 337), and a ca. 1930's Cape Cod cottage (at 12 Chace [#341]), of which there are several throughout Bolton. A few isolated examples of other house types were also built. The most stylish is probably the shingled Arts and Crafts house that Dr. and Mrs. Clemens built at their Upland Farm at 92 Wataquadoc Road (Area Form K) in 1929, with banks of casement windows and a large fieldstone chimney on the facade. One building unique in Bolton is the Powers House of 1942, built in the form of a traditional gambrel-roofed "Cape Ann cottage" at 615 Main Street (#187--NRDIS). Outbuildings: After World War I a few large gambrel-roofed barns were built in Bolton. One sits overlooking the fields and meadows east of the Still River at 386 Still River Road (#265--Area Form G); another was added behind the earlier New England barn at the Prospect Farm on West Berlin Road (#314--Area Form M). With the automobile era came the construction of garages on residential properties. Most of the earliest were built for one car, with either a gabled or hipped roof. A few were constructed of rock-faced concrete block; several later garages of the 1930's and early 1940's are clad in the beveled or "drop" siding that became popular at that time. Institutional: The Emerson School of 1923 (#17--NRDIS) and the First Parish/Federated Church of 1928 (#79--NRDIS) on Main Street at the center are both vigorously Colonial Revival buildings. The school, designed by architect Luther Greenleaf, is a hip-roofed brick building with a central lantern atop its slate roof, round-arched openings across the facade, and a full-height, Doric tetrastyle portico. The church was designed by Edwin Chapin of Worcester, with a tall three-stage steeple and a Palladian window above a tetrastyle portico. Commercial: Harry Sutton's Bolton Garage of ca. 1919 (#192--NRDIS; 719 Main Street) was built of rock-faced concrete block with a shallow-pitched roof and exposed rafter ends; it was greatly expanded to the rear in 1927. An unusual survival of a ca. 1920 store is located beside the house at 211 Hudson Road. This is a tiny, square hip-roofed building with large display windows and a double-leaf glass-and panel door (#235--see Area Form D). Late Modern Period (1945 - Present) (article index) Transportation Routes The Bolton Airport continued to operate until 1951, largely as a flight school. By 1947 it had trained three hundred pilots under the G.I. Bill; it was also a base for the Civil Air Patrol. With competition from cars and trucks, both railroads in the south part of town ceased passenger service by the middle of the century, but the tracks through Ballville still carry occasional freight trains today. The Great Road/Route 117 was widened between 1953 and 1956, and some of its curves straightened at that time. There was considerable local controversy in recent years when the name of the road was changed to Main Street, and many local residents still refer to it as Great Road. The many modern side- and subdivision roads in the town today have been added since 1960, most of them in the north half of the town. The biggest change in transportation routes, however, came in 1964, with the building of Interstate Route 495 north-south through the town just east of the center. Its construction involved the destruction of a few historic houses and the moving of others (cf. the early-eighteenth-century Kimmens/Whitcomb House, now at 48 Hudson Road (#153). The highway, which has an interchange with Route 117 on the Pan just west of the Pan Burying Ground, passes over South Bolton and Sugar Roads, but severed Old Sugar Road and Burnham Roads in the north, and Wheeler Road in the south part of town. Population A sharp increase in population to 1,264 by 1960, even before the construction of I-495, marks the beginning of Bolton's transformation in the latter part of the twentieth century to a "bedroom community" for the larger regional business and industrial centers. With the development of the I-495 corridor as a business and technical area, Bolton's population had rose to over 3,000 by 1988, and has just crossed the 4,000 mark this year. In 1947 the Federated Church of Bolton revised its charter to incorporate four more religious groups--Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and the United Church of Christ. Bolton's first Catholic church, St. Francis Xavier, was built on Main Street west of the center in 1952-3. In 1963, over a hundred years after the demise of the Hillside Church, a new Congregational society was founded in Bolton, holding services for several years in the barn at 12 Wataquadoc Road (#126--see Area Form J). In 1986 their church, Trinity Church, Congregational, modeled on the 1719 West Barnstable Meetinghouse, was built to the rear of the property. In 1961 a large new high school, Nashoba Regional High, was established at the intersection of Main Street and Green Road, with a one-story building designed by the Architects Collaborative. A large addition was built in 1974. Ninety-six residents of Bolton served in World War II; four were killed. In 1956, in a gift by Mr. and Mrs. Howard Mayo, the Memorial Field just south of the center on Wataquadoc Road was established, with a fieldhouse of native stone, in honor of the four who died. Later the old doorstep from the Fryville School (District School #8), found a new function as a memorial marker there to those who served in World War II and the Korean War. Several organizations of recent years have taken up the cause of both the appreciation and perpetuation of aspects of Bolton's rural and agricultural heritage. There is an active group of local 4-H clubs, and the Bolton Fair, still the largest one-day agricultural fair in Massachusetts, is a major regional agricultural attraction every September. The Bolton Historical Society, founded in 1962 and headquartered at 676 Main Street in the relocated wing of the old Atherton/Holman Inn--#20--NRDIS), is both the curator of documents and artifacts related to the town's development and the sponsor of many programs designed to raise the public's awareness of Bolton's past. The Bolton Garden Club, founded in 1967, has taken charge of several public planting projects, as well as plant- and wildflower identification and tours of conservation lands. Finally, the efforts of the non-profit Bolton Conservation Trust, incorporated in 1975, have resulted in the preservation of hundreds of acres of meadows, woods, wetlands, and agricultural land throughout the town, as well as historic buildings and engineering sites. Settlement Pattern Since World War II, and especially in the past two decades, much of Bolton's former farmland and woods has been subdivided for houselots. Some agriculture continues in town, partly assisted by MGL Ch. 61A agricultural use designations. Hundreds of acres are still occupied by the three major twentieth-century orchards--Bolton Spring Farm at the East End (Area Form C), the Nicewicz family's Windy Hill Farm flanking Sawyer Road (see Form #172, 116 Sawyer Road. and Bolton Orchards (Area Form H) on Wilder Road. Another modern orchard, at Nashoba Valley Winery (Area Form K), where fruit wines are made, has been in existence since the Clemens property at 92 Wataquadoc Road was sold in 1981. While most of the early-twentieth-century "gentlemen's farms" have been broken up and at least partially developed as house lots, a few have remained relatively intact. Morgan horses have been raised since 1958 at the beautiful Townshend Farm at Wataquadoc and Old Bay Roads (the old Wheeler/Holman/Howe/Cunningham Farm--Area Form L), and smaller horse- and riding farms are operated at various locations. There are still a few small herds of cows, and one large pig farm, though not many chickens. At least one herd of sheep still grazes on pastures off Long Hill Road, and a few llamas have been added to the mix. A large country club, the International Golf Club, owned by ITT Corp, which also leases some land to farmers, owns hundreds of acres of land between Ballville and Wataquadoc Roads. The present golf course was built in 1961 on what was formerly the Runaway Brook Country Club, which in turn had been established on the former airport land in the early 1950's. 600 acres of the property are now under zoned for non-residential use. Economic Base With most residents now employed outside the town's borders, much of Bolton's local economy still has its source in its large orchards. There is some industry near the east border of town, where GenRad Corporation, its building now occupied by Future Electronics, built a manufacturing plant after World War II, and Atlantic Microwave Corporation followed soon afterward. Skinner Auction Galleries, the largest antiques auction house in New England, now located in a large building at 357 Main Street, grew out of a small antiques business established by Robert and Nancy Skinner in Elcanah Caswell's nineteenth-century shoe shop at 443 Main Street (#67). The Bolton Office Park, a large office building, was built by the Flatley Company near the I-495 interchange in the 1970s, and two large mixed commercial buildings are now located near it on Route 117. Architecture Residential: Houses built in Bolton since World War II have followed most of the popular stylistic trends of the times in New England. A few one-story ranch houses were built in the 1950's (cf. the replacement for the old Whitcomb Homestead at 149 Main Street [#205]), and the Cape Cod house has continued to the present time. In general, the Colonial Revival influence has never abated, appearing in one guise as the so-called "garrison colonials" of the 1960's, and in another as the large reproduction saltboxes and neo-Georgian farmhouse architecture of the 1980's and 1990's, many examples complete with wood-shingle roofs. Institutional: The most evident example of the 1980's trend for colonial reproduction is at Trinity Church of 1986, a copy of the West Barnstable Meetinghouse of 1719. Newer wings of 1952 and 1971 at the Emerson School and at the 1957 Davis Hall of the Federated Church have followed a more blended approach of new architecture that utilizes some design elements of the existing building to create a visual harmony between the old and new. Commercial: On a larger scale, the three largest recent commercial buildings, "the Saltbox" of ca. 1972 at 626 Main Street, a two-story clapboarded professional office complex at 563 Main Street of the 1980's, and Hebert Candies at 47 Sugar Road utilize elements of colonial and nineteenth-century architecture in an attempt to create visual continuity with the larger area in which they are located. Industrial/office construction: With the exception of the high school, the largest in scale of Bolton's modern buildings are the Flatley office building of ca. 1975 at 580 Main Street, and the industrial buildings at the east end of town. All are flat-roofed, post-International Style complexes of concrete or brick with large expanses of glass. Conclusion People are attracted to Bolton today for the same reasons turn-of-the-century city dwellers saw the town as a rural retreat--its rural character, spectacular views and vistas, and the allure of its historic architecture. The town is still being shaped by many of the same factors that were present earlier in its history, however. Although Main Street is no longer a major thoroughfare for stagecoaches and cattle drives, the presence of I-495, and Route 117's continued function as a convenient route east toward Boston make Bolton a major attraction for commuters looking for a small town to settle in. If increased residential development threatens the very subject of that attraction through the loss of farmland, woods, and historic buildings, it is to be hoped that the knowledge and awareness made possible by the community-wide Historic Properties Survey, as well as the 1998 Preservation Plan, will help to counteract that threat. ~ fin ~ http://www.townofbolton.com/hist/history.htm Source: History of Addison Co., VT - book online, url below. Thomas Sawyer was born in Bolton, Mass., in 1742, and was bred a millwright. He took a prominent part in the Revolutionary movements of the age in which he lived. He was placed in many important offices in Massachusetts during the preliminary battles of the Revolution. In the latter part of 1776 he was stationed for a short time at Ticonderoga, and when his time of service had expired at that place he returned to his family in Massachusetts. In making this journey he passed through a part of Vermont, and was impressed with the opportunities here presented for enterprise and usefulness. In 1777 he moved his family to Clarendon, where he built a bullet-proof block-house of solid oak timber. Even the windows were provided with such heavy shutters that a bullet could not be made to pass through them. He remained in Clarendon until 1783, when he began operations in Salisbury, at the falls where the village now is, and near Lake Dunmore. Here he erected the first saw-mill, and on the 1st day of June, 1783, sawed the first log, having in two months erected a dam and a building sufficiently large for a saw-mill and a grist-mill, the latter of which was put in operation in the following winter. As this part of Salisbury was claimed by Leicester at that time, he was the first representative from that town in the State Legislature, and was also one of its first magistrates. He left the State in 1795, and settled with his family in what is now called Manchester, Ontario county, N. Y., where he died three years afterward. http://web.middlebury.edu/lis/lib/guides_and_tutorials/guides_to_collections/collection_guide-vermont/internet_r esources/history_addison_county/chap31_hac.htm ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Oliver Sawyer, Bolton, Massachusetts This article previously appeared in The Gristmill, No. 89 December 1997 Notes on New England Edge Tool Makers, II Oliver Sawyer (1794-1836), (O. Sawyer), Edge Tool Maker, Bolton, MA, ca. 1808-1836 Oliver Sawyer was born February 3,1784, the son of Calvin and Abigail Sawyer. Oliver's first wife was Polly Whitcomb. They were married April 12, 1809. Their children were Horace, born Feb.22, 1811, Roxanna, baptized May 13, 1812, and Oliver, Jr., baptized December 13,1813. Sometime prior to 1821, Oliver's first wife died. In that year, he married Azuba Whitcomb Holman, a widow, And sister of his first wife. Oliver's father, Calvin, and his older brother, Elijah, were both blacksmiths. However, information indicates Oliver probably learned the trade from his brother. Elijah purchased a house with a blacksmith shop in Bolton, MA, in 1797. Apparently, several generations of blacksmiths had worked and lived there prior to that. This tradition continued, because even after Oliver's death in 1836, several more generations of blacksmiths used the shop. In 1808, Oliver purchased the house and shop from his brother Elijah (perhaps in anticipation of his forthcoming marriage in 1809.) Oliver was 25 at this date and probably established as a blacksmith. An existing account page for Oliver indicates that his work was not always toolmaking. The large number of tools signed 0. SAWYER that are extant today would indicate the major emphasis of his work was toolmaking. He was certainly proud of his profession, as indicated by the edge tools and hammer carved into his headstone (Fig. 1). His life was short-lived. He died on March 25,1836, at the age of 52. His second wife, Azuba, survived him by three years, dying on June 4,1839, at age 55. An estate inventory of his tools and equipment was taken on April 2,1836. (To be published in a future article.) Most of the surviving tools known are hot-stamped, O.SAWYER. CAST STEEL (Fig. 2). A large strap hinge on an inside door of a home in the adjacent town of Berlin, MA, is stamped O.SAWYER. BOLTON, and the silage chopping block knife shown in Fig. 3, is stamped 0. SAWYER. CAST STEEL. BOLTON MASS. Tool collectors and others traveling through Massachusetts usually use Route 495. If you are interested in viewing the Sawyer headstone, exit 495 N. onto Route 117 (exit 27), turn left and stop at the cemetery next to the entrance to Rt. 495N. The Sawyer headstone is the ninth from the left in the front row directly behind the stone wall. (Park in the small driveway at the left when facing the cemetery.) The Oliver Sawyer house was located right inside the arch created by Rt. 495 and the northbound exit ramp to Rt. 117. It was relocated a mile away, but is privately owned and not open to the public. The blacksmith's shop is long gone. The author would like to hear of other tools marked 0. SAWYER. Roger Smith 2/22/98 http://www.mwtca.org/OTC/ar000017.htm