Other Resources

One of the oldest small-manufacturing resources in the district survives only as a site, but its significance, at the heart of the district, continues as a town-owned park. This is Pond Park, (Map #28) established in 1905 to include the pond, dam, foundations and raceways of a mill site that was in use throughout most of the nineteenth century.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the remains of the Sawyer saw mill, along with two buildings that hung over the pond, Maloney's carriage-painting shop, and a wood-working shop, were all in deteriorating condition. A group of civic-minded citizens had the buildings torn down, and the new Village Improvement Society planted trees, shrubs and grass around the pond and on the impoundment of the raceways, with a wooden footbridge over the dam. (The bridge there today is a near-replica of that bridge). The fieldstone mill floor and foundations, dam abutments, and retaining walls of the raceways are broken down in some places, but they, the dam, and the pond remain as important reminders of the site's industrial significance in the heart of the village center. Even an overflow or secondary pond to the south of the dam still occasionally floods, and Great Road still crosses the north edge of the millpond on the old fieldstone causeway, which was raised on a rubble base early in this century, its curb capped with concrete and an iron-pipe railing.

The lines of two historic lanes and roads, perpendicular to Main Street, are still apparent. The path to the First Meetinghouse (Map #47), which can still be discerned just east of 720 Main Street, dates to as early as 1740; the nineteenth-century Old Townhouse Road (Map #14) is a stone-wall-lined path mounting the hill cast of the Town House. The Townhouse Road may even have continued south of the Great Road (Main Street), as it aligns with a wide fieldstone bridge over the Great Brook (Map #25).