Early Industrial Period (1831-1872)

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.