District Overview

The Bolton Center Historic District is comprised of 73 acres that encompass the historic, institutional, commercial, and residential core of the community. It is situated around the approximate center of the residential and rural town of Bolton Massachusetts, along the major colonial and early 19th century transportation route, the Lancaster Road, (what is today, Route 117 and Main Street). The area still retains the much of the character of a traditional linear New England town center.

Most of its buildings, which span all the town's historic periods, are aligned along the winding main road, silhouetted against a backdrop of hilly woods and fields to the north, and lowlying plain and wetlands to the south. Contributing resources here include the 1850s town hall, three nineteenth-century schoolhouses, the early-twentieth-century public library, and the town's first modern elementary school, built in the 1920's. Remaining from the pre-railroad stagecoach era are several buildings associated with a prominent regional inn, and one of its wings.

In the western part of the district are two rare surviving commercial buildings -- and early-nineteenth-century hip-roofed brick store, and a tall, narrow clapboard Greek Revival building that was a tailor's shop, doctor's office, and post office. Most of the residences in the district are well-preserved examples of the late Colonial, Federal, and Greek Revival eras. Interspersed among them are a few later vernacular Italianate and Queen Anne houses, and several Craftsman cottages.

The outer ends of the district still form a transition from the clustered town center to its rural surroundings. Leaving I-495 (built 1964) behind, one enters the east end of the district through the two-hundred-year-old Samuel Blood Farm, passing between its hip-roofed houses built by one of the farm's early-twentieth-century owners. At the opposite end of the district are the farmstead and fields of another farm from the same era, which belonged to a succession of three ministers.

Throughout the district, barns and outbuildings, many dating to the nineteenth century, provide reminders of the area's agrarian and small-manufacturing past. At the center of the district, the foundations, dam, and millpond of a mid-nineteenth-century sawmill remain. preserved as part of a small park. scattered throughout the district and enhancing the character of the village as a whole are a considerable number of other structures and objects, including several historic roads and drives, a network of fieldstone walls, a fieldstone bridge, a stone marker that displayed the mileage to Boston in the days of the stagecoach, and a brick "powderhouse".

In all, the Bolton Center Historic District retains integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association as the town center for over two centuries.