Outbuildings

The rural atmosphere of the Bolton Center district is enhanced by a substantial number of surviving barns and other agricultural outbuildings. Commanding a view from a great distance, for instance, are the large connected, cupolaed dairy barns on the hillside at 579 Main Street. Most of those structures apparently date to ca. 1900 and slightly later. Behind them, a separate two-story wagon shed with pointed-arched windows probably dates to the latter part of the nineteenth century.

The earliest outbuilding in the district may be the low-eaved barn behind 694 Main Street, which stands on a high fieldstone foundation with a wide opening for wagons to pass through. Many barns are small, and nearly all are of the post-1830 "New England" type, built with a vertical-board sliding wagon door either centered or off-center in the main gable end. Some of the barns, like the well-preserved attached barn at 749 Main Street, are "banked", with a wagon run ascending to the main door, and a lower-level storage area with its entry at the opposite end of the building.

Several barns have vernacular details corresponding to a prevailing architectural style, such as the cornice brackets and the oculus or wheel window in the gable of the barn between 711 and 713 Main Street. The lowest level of the large mid--nineteenth-century banked barn at 683 Main Street has a wagon door in the side wall facing the road; its surround has the shallow pediment typical of the Greek Revival period. Few barns in the district have upper-level hay doors; an exception is the little attached barn at 662 Main Street, (now with modem garage doors), which has a shallow-arched, diagonal-board hay door in the gable.

Essentially the same gable-end building form was used for numerous artisans shops, such as Howard Atwood's early-twentieth-century board-and-batten blacksmith shop was moved to Bolton Historical Society property behind 676 Main Street in 1976. It is speculated that the little gable-end barn/garage standing close to the road at 714 Main Street may have been one of the eighteenth-century potash shops, known to have been moved to the site shortly before the building of the house in 1826.

Several automobile garages were built adjacent to the houses in the district in the early part of this century. A few, undoubtedly because of fire-safety considerations, are of masonry, with the typical hipped roof of the 1910s and 1920s. The three-car garage at 579 Main. Street is of fieldstone; the one-car garage at 664 Main Street is brick. Some later garages, such as the gabled 2-car garages at 670 and 733 Great Road are clad in the novelty beveled or "drop" siding that became popular in the 1930s.