Late Modern Period (1945-present)

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

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.