Worcester, Massachusetts, #5.

The Road From Paris To New York

Upper Boston Post Road Entry #18 (UBPR #18)

*Stearns Tavern in its current and, hopefully, final location at 140 Mill Street in Worcester.*

“Spent the Day at Worcester in Riding about with Mr. Putnam to see his Farm. He does what he pleases with Meadows and Rivers of Water. He carries round the Streams wherever he pleases.”

John Adams, Diary, June 1, 1771.

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“The essence of walking is slowness”

Erling Kagge, Walking: One Step at a Time, 2019.

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“Worcester: Paris of the Eighties”

Charles Slatkin, 1980s

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Introduction: Mile 50

The last of the series of entries describing my walk along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road through Worcester begins with a view over the valley in front of me, at a point 49 miles along the road from the Old State House in Boston, in an area that is now called Webster Square. The previous walk crossed a relatively flat plateau about 520 feet in elevation, passing Clark University along the way. This walk begins as the road begins to descend into the valley. The road then crosses a bridge over a brook that was the first significant feature shown on the “Road to New York” southwest from the center of Worcester on the map of 1795 produced by John Peirce and David Andrews. After passing through the busy commercial area around Webster Square, the road then continues west for one and a half miles, climbing steeply out of the valley to reach an elevation of 787 feet above sea level at the border with Leicester, the highest point along the first 51 miles of the Upper Boston Post Road from the Old State House in Boston..

The first entry in Worcester followed the route of the Upper Boston Post Road from the border with Shrewsbury into Lincoln Square, a distance of 3.3 miles through the northeastern part of the city. From Lincoln Square the project slowed down appreciably as I spent several months and three entries wandering along Main Street through the center of Worcester, from the old Worcester County Courthouse in Lincoln Square to City Hall in the second entry, then from City Hall to the Federal Courthouse in the third entry, and then out along the road southwest of City Hall to Clark University in the most recent entry, areas rich in history related to the Post Road and areas rich in culture and rich in architecture. Worcester is fortunate that a dedicated group of preservationists have made great efforts to document the history of properties throughout the city but particularly along architecturally-rich Main Street. It also fortunate that a number of finely detailed maps of the city have been produced over the course of two centuries, thus making it easy for me to indulge in detailed descriptions of virtually every step I have taken through the center of the city along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road.

The descriptions of sites of historic, cultural, or architectural interest in this, the last section of the long walk through Worcester, are just as detailed but there are fewer buildings to discuss and the maps are less detailed, especially once the road passes through Webster Square and continues for a mile or so to the border with Leicester. This is largely because the area beyond Webster Square was lightly populated even into the twentieth century so there just is not as much to write about, much as the area along Lincoln Street from Shrewsbury into the city was historically lightly populated and sites of interest were scattered over greater distances. The walk in this entry is more similar to that of the first entry than it is to the three most recent entries. As I leave Worcester, the road once again becomes more tranquil and the distance between sites of historical interest begins to lengthen.

This does not mean that there is nothing of interest on this walk. Unlike the previous entry, which had much of architectural and cultural interest but little left of the old road, this entry has fewer architectural gems but more history directly connected to the Post Road. This section of the road comprises the final two miles west to the Leicester border and begins more than two miles from the center of Worcester, so it is unsurprising that there were a number of taverns operating over the years along this section of the road. Perhaps more surprising is that there remains in Worcester a thoughtfully restored historic building more than two centuries old, with connections to the Upper Boston Post Road, although it has been relocated from its original location on Main Street.

Detail of a map of Worcester produced by Heman Stebbins in 1833, showing the final two miles of the Upper Boston Post Road through the town. This entry begins just west of today’s Beaver Street, which is the road shown on the map that leads north from the main road a little past the “2 mile” mark on the upper right, directly opposite the house of “S.S. Gates.” The main road is then shown continuing downhill, past the house of “C. Stearns” and past “C.M. Deland’s Tavern,” to the threeway junction with the “road to Oxford,” today’s Webster Street, and with Cambridge Street, a busy junction that was called “New Worcester” on some older maps, but that now is called Webster Square. The old road then crossed Beaver Brook (sometimes called Halfway River) and curved south for a short distance along the northern edge of Curtis Pond. A little further along, across from the house labeled as “L. Cutting,” the straight road leading southwest from the old road west is the Stafford Turnpike, today’s Stafford Street. The Stafford Turnpike, which opened in 1810 to provide a more direct route to Hartford and to New York, hastened the decline of the Boston Post Road to Springfield as the principal route to New York from Worcester. Beyond the junction with the Stafford Turnpike is the house of Joseph Curtis, formerly the country estate of James Putnam, a place visited by John Adams in 1771. Further along is the lane leading to the Gates farm and homestead; today the road is called Gates Lane and leads to Coes Reservoir and to the current location of the building called Stearns Tavern, moved from its original home on Main Street in the 1970s. The “old road” then diverges from a newer road a little further along at the site of “J. Jones Tavern.” The old road, which is shown climbing steeply uphill past the house of “S. Parsons” to the border with Leicester, is today’s Apricot Street while the newer, lower road, is the continuation of Main Street, which runs adjacent to Kettle Brook, with some subsequent alterations that are discussed in the main text, to the border with Leicester.

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Blandscape

Most of the area southwest from the center of Worcester through which the old road to New York (today’s Main Street) passed was lightly populated before the Civil War and parts of the road had few buildings well into the twentieth century. An exception was the area just ahead of me, where the road begins to descend, from a peak elevation of 539 feet at Marble Street, into a valley through which various brooks meander, eventually converging to form the Blackstone River about two miles downstream. This area became an early manufacturing center in Worcester as mills sprang up along the brooks to power machinery. This area is shown as significantly more developed on the detailed map of Worcester produced by Heman Stebbins in 1833: only a half-dozen houses appear on the map along a mile and a half section of the old road across the plateau where Clark University is now located (see the previous entry), but as the road descends to cross what is variously called “Halfway River,” “Middle River,” or “Beaver Brook” on maps of the area, the number of black squares representing buildings increases dramatically. There are roughly a dozen buildings shown along the section of the map that corresponds today with Main Street, beginning just beyond today’s Marble Street and ending at the bridge that crosses over today’s canalized version of Beaver Brook, a distance of just under a half-mile.

About two miles along the road southwest from the center of the city, in the area referred to as “New Worcester” on Phineas Ball’s 1860 map of the city, there are a few large estates shown as the road descends the hill and a large number of smaller buildings lining the streets around the busy junction of Main Street, Mill Street, Webster Street, and Cambridge Street. Samuel Triscott puts names on the buildings along the road on his 1878 map of the area around what is called “Webster Square” on his map, the name by which the area is still called. Triscott also colors commercial buildings red and clearly marks ecclesiastical buildings and civic buildings in black, as well as drawing property lines, making it easier to identify individual lots. Along with the highly detailed insurance maps produced for the Sanborn company (of which I consulted maps produced in 1910 and in 1936-1937) the maps make it fairly straightforward to follow the fate of various properties along the walk into Webster Square. Beyond Webster Square the maps are less detailed, but as I stated earlier, the area beyond Webster Square was not heavily built up until well into the twentieth century.

View west along Main Street heading into Webster Square. At left is Arena Plaza, located on the site of the estate of Loring Coes, a prominent manufacturer with factories in Webster Square. At right in the distance are the towers of Webster Square Apartments, built on the site of the Deland house, my candidate for the original Stearns Tavern, and on the site of the estate of manufacturer Aury G. Coes, brother and partner of Loring Coes. Their original factory was located along Mill Street, next door to the A.G. Coes estate.

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It is a good thing I have detailed old maps to guide me on this section of the walk because today this is an underwhelming section of the road with quite a lot of new development, little evidence of any remaining older structures, and superficially little to discuss along the way downhill. The left side of the road as I head downhill (the south side of the road as it initially heads southwest and then west, as opposed to the right-hand, or north side) from Lowell Street has very little of note. The entire block between Lowell Street and Tirrell Street is taken up by a large property with a large house shown as occupied by “J. Dean” on Triscott’s map. The house was built sometime after 1860, as it is not shown on the Phineas Ball map, and survived well into the twentieth century as it appeared on the 1910 and 1937 Sanborn maps. Today the entire lot is taken up by a brick commercial building housing a company called Vital Emergency Medical Services, an ambulance service that apparently was not that vital as it now appears to be closed. Surrounded by a large and empty parking lot, the property looks both forlorn and ugly, a description that can sadly be applied to more than one property along the route of this walk.

The next blocks are not much of an improvement: there is an ugly commercial building at 1023 Main, a house with an ugly brick commercial building attached to the front occupied by a business selling Cannabis-related paraphernalia, followed by an old garage building that now houses Comfort Cremation, followed by an empty lot and two slightly shabby brick apartment buildings put up in the 1920s. The next block is even worse: a large shopping plaza anchored by a Dollar General in a strange Quonset hut-style metal building (see photo above) is followed by a curiously-shaped redbrick building, built as a garage sometime after 1910 and topped by a large billboard, which today houses a wireless service and McGirt’s Pub. The final building along the left side of the road, located at the junction of Main Street and Cambridge Street, on the southeast corner of busy Webster Square, is an addiction treatment facility called Jeremiah’s Inn, housed in one of the few buildings remaining from the nineteenth-century in the area.

The right-hand side of the road as I walk downhill to Webster Square is scarcely more memorable. I start at the exquisitely banal Webster Square Package Store, a liquor store or “packie” as they are usually called locally, a common feature of most neighborhoods in most towns in the Boston area. The sign on the building, which also advertises “Polar Ginger Ale,” is the only feature of this typically drab building that gives it any specific local character. Polar Park, the nearby home of the triple-A farm team of the Boston Red Sox, is also sponsored by the well-known local beverage company. The “packie” is followed by a couple of nondescript houses covered in vinyl siding, then a brick apartment building built for Solomon Lofman in 1928 (MACRIS #WOR.2405; 1020 Main Street),¹ located on the empty lot shown on Triscott’s map of 1878 as owned by “N.R. Scott & Sons.” Beyond Agawam Street is another house that needs a little help, followed by a brick church, the “Iglesia de Dios,” at 1026 Main Street. Across Lucian Street, at 1030 Main Street, is a modern assisted-living complex, followed by an apartment building, two “triple-deckers,” and a two-family house, all of which are covered in vinyl-siding. The United Methodist Church occupies a modern brick church building (from 1966) at a site that has been occupied by a Methodist church since at least 1878 (there is one on Triscott’s map of 1878 at the same location). Finally the looming twin towers of the Webster Square Apartments take up the remaining lots leading into Webster Square. As I initially suggested, this collection of architecture is not exactly a high point on my walk along the Upper Boston Post Road.

Yet even along this modern, overbuilt, “boring” quarter mile of the Post Road there is quite a lot to say about what once stood along this section of the road. On the “left-hand” side of Main Street three buildings are shown on the 1833 map by Stebbins, all quite close to Webster Square, while the area slightly more uphill is empty. On Phineas Ball’s 1860 map two cross streets, Lowell Street and Tirrell Street have been laid out but there are no more streets and no more houses, with the exception of one new house at the southeast corner of Tirrell and Main Street, until Cambridge Street, the old street leading east out of Webster Square. The development along this stretch of Main Street is virtually unchanged twenty years later and it is not until 1910 that the contemporary street plan is shown on the maps of the area, with the appearance of Stoneland Road and Hitchcock Road. By 1937 many of the contemporary buildings along the road have been built but there are still large sections of the road that are yet to be developed, most notably the large block between Hitchcock Road and Cambridge Street now housing the Arena Shopping Plaza. The pattern of development was not much different on the other side of Main Street, with few new buildings added along the street until well into the twentieth century.

The house of Uriah Stone, purchased from Elizabeth Stearns in 1833, in its original location at 1030 Main Street on the corner of Lucian Street. From 1960 to 1973 the house was lived in by the Harrington family, who also operated a business selling carpets from the building. The house was moved to a location on Park Avenue in 1974 and was subsequently moved to its current location, Coes Park on Mill Street, on the shore of Coes Reservoir in 2016 (see photo at the beginning of this entry). Although the building is undoubtedly at least two centuries old and is referred to as the Stearns Tavern, I suspect this is not the building that originally operated as the tavern run by Charles Stearns. See the entry below for more.

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Stone Unturned

The reason development occurred at a relatively late date along this stretch of Main Street is that most of the land was owned by two families: the Stone family and the Coes family. The land in each family followed a different developmental trajectory but the evolution of the land on the property of each family provides a miniature history of the evolution of Worcester from a small rural eighteenth century town into the second largest city in New England. The land along the south side of Main Street from Tirrell Street to the Arena Plaza just past Hitchcock Street, as well as a smaller parcel of land along the north side of Main Street from Agawam Street to the six-family apartment building at 1038 Main Street opposite Hitchcock Street were all part of the large estate of the Stone family. According to a genealogy of the Stone family published in 1904 “Uriah Stone (1794-1880) moved from Oxford to Worcester at an early age, and lived and died in the old colonial house on Main St. near Webster Square. He owned considerable real estate, the larger part of which is now in the possession of the family. Mr. and Mrs. Lucian Stone and Mrs. George E. Stone reside in the old homestead.”² Stone purchased the two properties, according to the detailed report prepared by Neil Larson for Preservation Worcester “from Elizabeth Stearns in 1833 [Worcester County Deeds 292:538]. One was a four-acre lot with a two-story dwelling house and other outbuildings on the west side of Main Street. The other was located on the opposite side of the road and contained 35 acres. Stone paid $3,000 for both parcels.”³

This very large property remained primarily undeveloped farmland for decades and development was slow to occur even after the death of Uriah Stone in 1880. A quick look at the 1860 map produced by Phineas Ball (see below) shows the vast “empty” area of the Stone property where the bulk of the word “Worcester’ is placed on the map of “New Worcester.” The Stone house is located on the north side of the street, the large building directly above the “O” in “NEW WORCESTER” on the map. It is flanked to the east by the house of Augustus Prouty (c. 1860; MACRIS # WOR.1364; 1022 Main Street), a building which still exists at the northwest corner of Main Street and Agawam Street. Another building a little further east on Ball’s map, directly across from Lowell Street, is located near to where the Webster Square Package Store is currently located. This building is consistent with the black dot on the Stebbins 1833 map labeled “J. Bryant” and is still visible on Triscott’s map of 1878 (also below), but had been replaced by two newer buildings by 1910 (as shown on the Sanborn insurance map), the vinyl-covered buildings which still exist at 1016 and 1018 Main Street. It is possible that this is the house referred to in Caleb Wall’s Reminiscences of Worcester: “On the west side of Main street, just before descending the hill to New Worcester, is an ancient one-story dwelling, which was the residence of Ebenezer Whitney, (father-in-law of Wm. Hovey).”⁴

Triscott’s 1878 map clearly indicates the house of “U. Stone,” flanked by the smaller lots and houses of “J. Sutton” on the east side, newly built between the Prouty house and the Stone property, and “J. MCDaniel” on the west side, a distinctive narrow lot that is located directly across from Hitchcock Road on both Sanborn’s 1910 and 1937 maps. The “Sutton” property at 1026 Main Street is today the modern brick church housing the Hispanic Evangelical Iglesia de Dios, Worcester congregation. The “McDaniel” property is today the parking lot for the building that now sits on the site of the Stone house at 1030 Main Street, an uninteresting modern apartment building for assisted-living. The original building, however, still exists and is currently located a half-mile away, on the south shore of the Coes Reservoir, an odyssey as interesting as the house itself.

Detail of a map of Worcester produced in 1860 by surveyor Phineas Ball, who also served a year (1865) as mayor of the City of Worcester. This section of the detailed map shows the area called “New Worcester” on the map, but better known today as Webster Square. Notice that, although the areas along Webster Street, around Mill Street, Cambridge Street, and near Curtis Pond (at bottom left) are lined with (mostly) industrial buildings, the area uphill to the east along Main Street has only a few houses located on large properties. The curiously-shaped house above the “O” in “WORCESTER” is the Uriah Stone house, now called the Stearns Tavern, which was moved to 140 Mill Street in 2016. Stone also owned all the property across the street in which most of the word “WORCESTER” is written. Also shown are the Deland house (the cross-shaped house under the “W” in “NEW,” the Loring Coes estate across Main Street and A.G. Coes house next door, under the “E” in “NEW.” Next door to the Coes mansion, under the “N” in “NEW,” is the A.G. Coes & Co. factory complex. Also visible are the Elmwood Hotel, now Jeremiah’s Inn (on the northeast corner of Main Street and Cambridge Street, and the Stafford Turnpike. Also note that the old road west across Beaver Brook still curves and that it is called Leicester Street, not Main Street.

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Moving Day

The house that Uriah Stone purchased from Elizabeth Stearns in 1833 (WOR.1356) is likely the house shown on the map produced by Heman Stebbins in the same year, the one labeled “C. Stearns.” Charles Stearns, the husband of Elizabeth, had died in 1828 at the age of 81. Uriah Stone is listed in the 1855 Worcester City Directory (p. 145) as a farmer living on Main Street in New Worcester. Also living with him is his son Lucian B. Stone (1829-1910), who is listed as an “omnibus driver.” In the days before the internal combustion engine, the “omnibus” was pulled by horses, which explains the presence of the large barn shown on Triscott’s map, located on the south side of Main Street just east of the Loring Coes estate roughly where Hitchcock Road is located today, listed as belonging to “L&W Stone” (another son named William also ran the omnibus company). Later directories continue to list Uriah Stone as a farmer living along Main Street in New Worcester, but by 1875 the directories list Uriah as “boarding” at 1030 Main Street while Lucian Stone, omnibus proprietor, is listed as the owner of 1030 Main Street: Stone has clearly passed the property on to his son. Uriah Stone is last listed in the directory of 1880, the year in which he died.

After Uriah Stone’s death in 1880, Lucian Stone continued to live at 1030 Main Street and to operate the omnibus business, but he is also listed as the City Highway Commissioner in 1884. By 1901 he was an alderman and in 1907-8 he served as Worcester’s representative to the General Court.⁵ Shortly after Lucian Stone’s rise to higher office, the Stone property began to be divided into lots, and development finally began on what had for decades been farmland. As Neil Larson states in the report on the property (MACRIS #WOR.EL) “Trolley lines made the neighborhood accessible to more distant parts of the city,” trolley lines which happened to be operated by Lucian B. Stone, omnibus proprietor. Sanborn’s 1910 map shows Stoneland Road laid out with most of the plots already built upon. The barn is still shown straddling what is now Hitchcock Road, although little development has occurred on that street. The pace of development quickened after the death of Lucian Stone in 1910, when much of the remaining property, including the house at 1030 Main Street, was left to Lucian’s daughter and her husband, Georgiana and James Ives. Neil Larson tells us that “James and Georgiana Ives disappear from the city directory after 1923. They likely removed from the city once they had fully developed the open space around them and transformed the suburban environment they once enjoyed. By this time, Main Street had urbanized with multistory brick apartment houses looming opposite their home and commercial development dominating the once serene streetscape of elite homes and gardens.” The 1937 Sanborn Insurance map of the area (#222) shows that almost all of the lots on the old Stone property had by then been developed, including the house with the attached commercial block at 1025 Main Street, and the adjacent “cremation” garage at 1027 Main Street (both built by William T. McOwen in 1927; MACRIS WOR.2103), and the slightly rundown apartment buildings built by Isador Katz and Sarkis Malkasian Apartments (1925; WOR.2430) at 1037 and at 1039-1041 Main Street, “looming opposite” the old Stone homestead (a third building at 1029-1033 Main Street is gone and the lot is now used for parking by the tenants of the neighboring apartment building).

The former home of Uriah Stone and the putative Stearns Tavern as it looks today in its (hopefully) final resting place. The house was moved to this location on Coes Reservoir in 2016 after a forty-year stay at 651 Park Avenue. The house was originally located at 1030 Main Street, and is referred to as Stearns Tavern, but it is my belief that although Elizabeth Stearns, the widow of Charles Stearns (who died in 1828), owned and likely lived in the old house when she sold it to Uriah Stone in 1833, the tavern was in another building that was located a little further downhill, at 1050 Main Street, a house later owned by Charles M. Deland, who died in 1851. Subsequently his son Dr. Ebenezer Deland lived in the house, which was still shown on maps as late as 1937. Today the Webster Square East Tower occupies the site of what was likely the original Stearns Tavern.

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The old house at 1030 Main Street became by 1927, in keeping with the changes to the area, a commercial space.⁶ Jennifer B. Doherty, a historic preservation consultant, wrote a detailed report on the building in 2014, and relates the later history of the house:

“It was during this wave of development, in 1927, when the tavern was sold out of the Stone family, to Arthur E. Anderson and Edith I. Hendrick. Anderson and Hendrick had an antique shop in a barn behind the Hendrick family house at 772 Pleasant Street. They purchased the tavern with the intent to restore it and use it as a setting for their wares. According to a newspaper article of the time,

The house is to be entirely done over inside, with the reproductions of old-fashioned wall-papers. Some of the rooms are to be painted, as was often done at that time. The floors will be painted, and will have hooked rugs and other floor covering in vogue when the house was new. Every room will be furnished in furniture of the period and pictures, ornaments, dishes, copper, few, candle-sticks—every thing will be in keeping [sic].

It is likely that at this time a mural found in one of the rooms was painted; it depicts scenes from the Revolutionary War, particularly the battle of the Lexington and Concord. The Old Furniture Shop operated out of the house until the end of the 1950s.

In 1960, Robert F. and Mary B. Harrington purchased the property and converted it to a carpet store, Harrington House of Carpets. The carpet store operated until Robert’s death, after which Mary B. Harrington sold the property to Shirley A. Olson in 1973. A few months later, Homcorp, Inc. purchased the property. Newspaper articles from the time indicate that Worcester’s Home Federal Savings & Loan planned to use the parcel of land as an investment, as they also purchased the house next door at 1036 Main Street a week after they purchased the tavern property. The bank planned to move the tavern a half-mile to its new location at 651 Park Avenue to serve as a branch location. In early July of 1974, Merry Contracting Service of Duxbury moved the tavern to its new location, but the process proved to be more difficult than expected. While the side ell was easy to lift and move, the house proved harder to jack up, and even snapped the axle of one of the trucks being used to tow it.”

The building remained on Park Avenue for the next forty years, until it was threatened with demolition in 2015. By 2016 the building had been moved again, this time to its current home in a newly built park on Mill Street, next to Coes Reservoir. The building has been thoughtfully restored and now has a cafe run by the Seven Hills Foundation. An interesting documentary about the building and its recent history, including video of the move from Park Avenue to its new home and interviews with the daughters of Robert and Mary Harrington can be viewed online. The building today looks fantastic and is a pleasure to visit and, hopefully, it will thrive in its final resting place.

The only problem with this great story, is that I do not believe that this building is the Stearns Tavern!

Detail of a map of Worcester produced by Samuel Triscott in 1878. This section shows the area around Webster Square. Notice the house of “U. Stone” north of the old road a little west of Agawam Street, as well as the large property across the street which was also owned by “U. Stone.” The barn for the horses of the omnibus company run by Uriah’s sons, Lucian and William Stone, is shown on the map as “L&W. Stone,” just east of the residence of “L. Coes.” Directly across the street from the estate of Loring Coes, sandwiched between the “M.E. Church” and the estate of”A.G. Coes” is the house of “Dr. Deland.” I believe this house, now replaced by the easternmost tower of the Webster Square Apartments, is the original Stearns tavern, not the house of Uriah Stone, which is now located at 140 Mill Street.

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Stearns Tavern

What is known about the history of the Stearns Tavern is not consistent with the story that the house formerly located at 1030 Main Street is the building that formerly housed the tavern. Caleb Wall, writing in 1877 says this about the tavern: “Joseph Curtis for several years kept tavern in the old DeLand house, being the last owner and keeper of it previous to Charles M. DeLand. This house, in which a hotel was kept for many years, was built 65 years ago by Charles Stearns, who first kept a hotel in it, beginning in 1812, at the opening of the war with Great Britain. The public exercises of the opening of this hotel took place May 12, when a liberty pole was raised on the spot where Loring Coes’ house now stands, a barrel of punch was served up to the crowd outside, and the day was devoted to quoit pitching, ball playing, and other amusements. This was the first inauguration of New Worcester.”⁷ Wall also tells us that Joseph Curtis “kept the hotel at New Worcester from 1824 to 1830. He bought it of Deacon Uriah Stone, who kept it a few years after buying it of the original owner, Charles Stearns.”⁸ Wall also states that Charles Stearns, who died in 1828 and was buried in Mechanic Street Cemetery, “built and first kept the old C. M. Deland tavern at New Worcester in 1812.”⁹ Finally Wall writes of the “Deland tavern at New Worcester, kept from 1812 to about 1850, successively by Charles Stearns, Uriah Stone, Joseph Curtis, and C. M. Deland.”¹⁰

All of Wall’s statements lead to the conclusion that the house shown on Triscott’s map as the house of “Dr. Deland” is the original tavern building. Stearns sold the building to Uriah Stone who then sold it on to Joseph Curtis, who sold it to Charles M. Deland. On the 1833 map of Stebbins, the tavern is clearly shown as the “C.M. Deland Tavern,” a building distinct from the C. Stearns house a little further up the road, which is the building Uriah Stone purchased in 1833 from the widow of Charles Stearns. Charles Deland died in 1851, but his son Ebenezer Deland is listed as a dentist on Main Street in New Worcester in the 1855 city directory. In 1860 Ebenezer Deland was now listed as a physician still living and working at a house on Main Street in New Worcester. The 1875 (p. 280), 1880 (p. 353), and 1890 directories (p. 131) are more specific, listing physician Ebenezer H. Deland as living and working at 1052 Main Street. Also living at the house is Esther E. Deland, a daughter of Charles Deland and Ebenezer’s sister. It seems likely that the house of Charles Deland stayed in the family after his death and became the home and office of Dr. Ebenezer Deland. The Deland siblings are not listed in the 1900 directory but Ebenezer Deland died in 1901 in Worcester at the age of 72.

The report by Jennifer Doherty mentioned above may be at least partially to blame for the confusion about which property is the actual Stearns Tavern. Doherty notes that Stone purchased the four-acre lot in 1833 from Elizabeth Stearns and states that:

The site of the C.M. Deland House at 1050 Main Street. The house that stood here well into the twentieth century is likely the original “Stearns Tavern,” a tavern subsequently operated briefly by Uriah Stone, then by Joseph Curtis, and finally by Charles M. Deland. Deland died in 1851, but the 1855 Worcester City Directory, as well as subsequent directories through 1890, list the dentist and physician Dr. Ebenezer Deland as the resident and owner of 1050/1052 Main Street. Today one of the towers of Webster Square Apartments occupies the site.

“the deed for the smaller lot mentions the Curtis tavern in its boundaries, indicating that the tavern lot was not part of the land he purchased from Elizabeth Stearns. However at some point before 1857, the tavern and its lot were transferred back to Uriah Stone. The deed of this transfer has not been found, but Stone is marked on maps at the location beginning in 1857, and is referenced in deeds for nearby parcels. No evidence has been found that shows Stone operating the tavern during his second round of ownership. There is conflicting information about whether Stone even lived in the building during the second half of the 19th century. An 1886 essay makes note of the “tavern standing some rods south of [Stone’s] farm house,” however numerous directories and census records list Stone as living at 1030 Main Street, the address of the tavern.”

It seems much more likely that the reason the tavern property bounded the newly-purchased Stone lot was that it was a different building southwest along Main Street, most likely the Deland house at 1050/1052 Main Street, and that Stone was living in the same house that he bought in 1833 from Elizabeth Stearns, the house located at 1030 Main Street. Similarly, the 1886 essay referencing the “tavern standing some rods south (or southwest) of the farm house” is clearly an indication that Stone’s house and Stearns tavern are different buildings, the latter much more likely to be the Deland house.

A final clue that the Stearns Tavern was located in what was eventually the house of Dr. Deland at 1050 Main Street is the description of the opening of the tavern in 1812, by Caleb Wall, who noted that “the public exercises of the opening of this hotel took place May 12, when a liberty pole was raised on the spot where Loring Coes’ house now stands.” The large estate of Loring Coes once stood where the Arena Plaza is currently located, which is directly across the street from the site of the Deland house, whereas the Stone house is 100 yards up the hill from the site of the celebrations. On the 1833 Stebbins map the Stearns house and the Deland Tavern are neighbors, with a sizable gap in between the two buildings, so it is likely that the “boundaries” mentioned above indicated the line between the Stone property and the Deland property. In 1860 only the narrow lot of “J. McDaniel” separated the Deland and the Stone properties, indicating that at least some of the land between the two properties had been sold. On Triscott’s 1878 map a large lot to the west of the “J. McDaniel” lot along Main Street had been marked out but was empty, as it was on the 1910 Sanborn map, except for the western third, on which a two-family house had been built, the house now located at 1044 Main Street. However, by 1937, Irene Street had been built through the previously empty lot as well as the six-family at 1038, and the two triple-deckers at 1040 and 1042 Main Street. Triscott also shows a lot with a church between the Stone house and the Deland house, the “M.E. Church.” A newer ecclesiastical building, the United Methodist Church from 1966 still occupies the site at 1048 Main Street.

The building at 1050-1052 Main Street was still present on the 1910 Sanborn map, along with a few other buildings on the property, labeled as “sheds.” On the 1937 Sanborn map (#222), the building was still at the same location along with more buildings on the property, which was by then labeled on the map as a “Contractors Yard.” The building is now gone, replaced by the easternmost tower of the Webster Square apartments at 1050 Main Street, the 11th tallest building in Worcester.

An image of the residence of Aury Gates Coes, taken from the map of Phineas Ball, produced in 1860. This grand mansion was located at 1058 Main Street, today the location of the west tower of Webster Square Apartments.

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Monkey Wrench

Now that I have undermined the story (or, in the spirit of this entry, thrown a monkey wrench into the works) of an historic building in Worcester and an iconic symbol of successful preservation, I continue my walk along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road along Main Street into Webster Square. This entry is in danger of being renamed The Path of Destruction, part two (My first entry about Worcester was entitled The Path of Destruction) as few of the buildings that once stood in the busy area around Webster Square remain today. Perhaps the most impressive buildings that once stood along Main Street as it enters Webster Square were the two large estates that flanked the road, each owned by one of the Coes brothers, Loring (1812-1906) and Aury (1817-1875). The Loring Coes estate once stood at 1049 Main Street, on the site today occupied by the Arena Plaza, a particularly depressing but not atypical illustration of the changes along the road over time. The large property is shown on Ball’s map and on Triscott’s map. The property was still intact in 1910 on the Sanborn Insurance map (Vol. 3 #273), but by 1937 the house is gone and the lot is empty. A skating rink was built on the property, opening in 1946 as a roller-skating rink called the Webster Square Arena, which was then converted to an ice-skating rink in 1953, before becoming a roller-skating rink again in the 1980s.¹¹ The building which housed the arena was converted to commercial space and the result is the Arena Plaza strip mall, shown in the above photograph, a far cry from the noble estate that once stood on the property. The two estates of the Coes brothers were once intended to be the westernmost estates in a plan put forth by James Scofield to create along Main Street “one of the most beautiful residential streets in New England,” a topic I discussed in the previous entry about an interesting plan that was never enacted.

On the opposite side of Main Street, immediately to the west of the Deland house, was the estate of Loring’s younger brother, Aury Gates Coes.¹² This grand estate is shown on Ball’s map of 1860, and is also one of the buildings shown in the elegant illustrations Ball produced that frame the map of Worcester (see above). The building is labeled “A.G. Coes Est.” on Triscott’s map, as A.G. Coes was killed when his carriage overturned while driving along Main Street in December 1875. His relatives lived in the house for decades after his death and the building survived at least into the late 1930s, as it is clearly the house shown at 1058 Main Street on the 1937 Sanborn Insurance map of the area (see below). Today the house has been replaced by the west tower of Webster Square Apartments at 1060 Main Street, although it appears some of the trees that once fronted the property have been salvaged and screen the lower part of the ugly building from the street.

Wrenches on display at the Worcester Historical Museum. The top wrench is Loring Coes’ Patent Model for an adjustable wrench, commonly known as a monkey wrench, from 1841, which made the Coes brothers very wealthy. Although Coes did not invent the monkey wrench, his design made them much easier to use and were very popular.

The money that the Coes brothers used to build their large estates came from the factories that the brothers opened nearby along Beaver Brook in New Worcester in the 1840s. The two brothers began, like many nineteenth-century entrepreneurs, by apprenticing in nearby factories before breaking out on their own in 1836, when they “bought the wool machine business of Kimball & Fuller and continued making these machines until 1839.”¹³ The factory burned in 1839, and the brothers briefly moved to Springfield, where Loring Coes perfected a design for an improved adjustable screw wrench. In 1841 Loring Coes received a patent for a screw wrench (also known as a monkey wrench) that could be adjusted with one hand, as opposed to previous wrenches, which required two hands to adjust.¹⁴ The brothers returned to Worcester and began the manufacture of wrenches in the factory of Albert Curtis, just off Webster Street in New Worcester.¹⁵ The wrenches proved to be very popular and enabled the men to open their own factory in New Worcester, or Webster Square as it is known today. The brothers split in the 1860s for unknown reasons and established separate companies; the factories of Loring Coes & Co. were located near Coes Pond, a pond created by placing a dam across Tatnuck Brook, just before its merger with Beaver Brook. The area today is very close to the current location of the Stearns Tavern site in Coes Park, on the edge of Coes Reservoir near Coes Pond at the junction of Coes Street and Mill Street, very close to Coes Square. The Loring Coes factory was a prominent feature of the area.

The A.G. Coes & Co. buildings were located next door to the A.G. Coes mansion on Main Street at the junction of Mill Street, near Beaver Brook. Another large pond, created by a dam across Beaver Brook, enabled Coes to use water to power machinery to manufacture the wrenches which paid for the large estate next door. The buildings of A.G. Coes & Co. were in the lot next to his mansion, the buildings colored red on Triscott’s map above. Although some of the buildings are still visible on the 1910 Sanborn Insurance map, the map refers to the property as “Formerly A.G. Coes & Co. Wrench Manufacturing” and further notes that their is “no watchman” and that the buildings are “vacant.” In the Worcester Directory of 1875, both men are listed: Aury G. Coes, who lived at 1058 Main Street, was listed as a “wrench manufacturer” with factories located at 2 Leicester Street in Webster Square, while Loring Coes was listed as a resident of 1049 Main Street, and as a manufacturer of “Shears, blades, &c.” at a factory located at 1 Coes Square. After the death of his brother, Loring Coes eventually reunited the company in 1888. The company continued to operate at the Coes Square site until the 1920s when it was sold to the Bemis & Call company of Springfield, after which wrenches produced by the company were stamped with the word “Springfield” instead of “Worcester” as they had been for almost ninety years.

The machine shops and factory buildings that once housed the A.G. Coes Wrench Company on the northeast corner of Main Street at Mill Street no longer exist. The old building at 1066 Main Street that today houses a massage parlor may have elements of the original office building of A.G. Coes, but it is not a particularly interesting building. By 1937 a “filling station” had appeared on the corner of Main Street and Mill Street on the Sanborn map (see below), at the corner on which a Mobil station continues to operate today. There is little evidence of manufacturing at all in Webster Square. The dam across Beaver Brook had been removed by 1937, and Clark University took over the newly reclaimed land to build athletic fields and facilities. Beaver Brook might not have a dam across it any more, but it has been tamed as the result of a flood which inundated Webster Square in 1955, after which, according to the historic structure report for the Main Street and Curtis Street bridges over Beaver Brook (MACRIS WOR.9046) “major flood control projects were undertaken in this neighborhood in its aftermath. This section of Beaver Brook appears to have been deepened and concrete-lined as one element of this flood control project; the construction of the dike along the brook and the northern banks of the Curtis Ponds appears to have been another. The present Main/Curtis Streets bridge over the channelized Beaver Brook was presumably built as part of the same project.”

Detail of map #222 of Volume 2 of the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps of 1937, from the Library of Congress Collections. This section shows Main Street from Marble Street to Webster Square, the subject of most of this entry thus far. The large empty lot in the middle of the image is the former estate of Loring Coes and is today the location of Arena Plaza, named for the skating rink remodeled as the current commercial space. The large building at 1058 Main Street is the house of Aury G. Coes, brother of Loring. The two brothers operated factories using power provided by mills along Beaver Brook, shown at the upper left of the map. Only a few buildings remain on the map of the original factory buildings that were prominently labeled on Triscott’s 1878 map of the area.

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Cutting Through Webster Square

The brooks that flowed through this valley were the reason New Worcester came into being, as early manufacturers took advantage of the waters that flowed down from the hills that surround the valley to power machinery. It is important to note that prior to the American Revolution, the technology required to power manufacturing via water power had been prohibited by the British government from exportation to the colonies. In 1789, Moses Brown hired an English immigrant named Samuel Slater who had experience working and operating machinery in England. Slater realized that Brown’s factory in Pawtucket was inefficient, and so “Slater worked with local mechanics, like members of the Wilkinson Family, to make new machines. In December 1790, Slater got the machines running. For the first time, workers could produce thread on water powered machines in America.”¹⁶

In a manner not unlike the current wave of “tech entrepreneurs,” many young men sought their fortunes, particularly in New England, by embarking upon careers as manufacturers, constantly seeking patents for improved tools or methods of manufacture, opening factories along any moving body of water that could supply power, or renting space in buildings provided by investors like Stephen Salisbury in Worcester, about whom I wrote in a previous entry. Worcester, with its numerous hills, valleys, and waterways, proved fertile ground for the enterprising manufacturers and machine shops, mills, and factories popped up all over the town but especially near the brooks around Webster Square, an area that was earlier referred to as “New Worcester.” A glance at Stebbins’ map of 1833 above shows close to a dozen “machine shops” or “factories” or “mills” along the streams flowing through the area, especially near the convergence of various brooks around what is now Webster Square. Tatnuck Brook was dammed as we have seen, as was Beaver Brook, and the Coes brothers utilized the power to manufacture their wrenches and knives. Albert Curtis operated mills near Webster Street along Curtis Pond, created by a dam placed across Kettle Brook. All of these brooks converged around Webster Square to form the Middle River, which flowed east for about two miles before merging with Mill Brook to form the Blackstone River. Mill Brook ran through the center of Worcester, past the house of Stephen Salisbury, through Lincoln Square, and continued south along a course a little to the east of Main Street, until merging with the Middle River near what is today the junction of Interstate 290 and Route 146, near Holy Cross. The Blackstone Canal was created in the 1820s in an effort to improve transportation links from Worcester, a topic I discussed in the previous entry, and ran roughly adjacent to Mill Brook and then the Blackstone River to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the site of the Slater Mill that had initiated the Industrial Revolution in the United States thirty years earlier.

Levi Hardy Knife Manufacturing Company, Mill Street in Worcester. The workers in this now-closed building and in earlier precursors on the property adjacent to Beaver Brook produced knives and blades for more than a century.

One of the few remaining, albeit tenuous, connections to the former bustling manufacturing center in New Worcester is the building along the west side of Mill Street flanking Beaver Brook as it makes a turn south after flowing under Mill Street. This is the site of the Levi Hardy Knife Manufacturing Company (MACRIS WOR. 3071; 17 Mill Street). The Coes brothers purchased the company from Moses Clement, which primarily produced blades for hay-cutting. In 1854 they formed a partnership with Levi Hardy to manufacture knives. The partnership dissolved in the 1860s and Hardy continued the business on his own. According to the historic structure report “the original wooden structures were destroyed by a series of fires in 1947 and the current building was built in 1947-48 with substantial additions in 1977 and 1985 to the north and south sides.” Today the building sits abandoned along the road (see photo), the sole remaining link to the Coes brothers, to the heyday of manufacturing, and to what must have been a much more vibrant Webster Square.

Webster Square, as a major crossroads in the western part of Worcester, is certainly busy but vibrant is not a word I would use to describe the area. Businesses come and go with alarming frequency in the ramshackle commercial spaces around the square. The next building west from the old Loring Coes residence (now Arena Plaza) is a curved redbrick building that clearly once functioned as a garage but, in the time that I have been researching the old road, the commercial space at 1051 Main Street has gone from being a mattress seller to a business providing wireless service, and the restaurant in the adjacent space has also changed hands and name. The houses that once occupied the lot on the Stebbins map, on Ball’s map, on Triscott’s map, and on the 1910 Sanborn map were gone by 1937 when the current building appears on the map. However, the building next door, at 1059 Main Street on the corner of Cambridge Street, is one of the few nineteenth-century buildings still remaining along this section of Main Street.

*Jeremiah’s Inn at 1059 Main Street in Webster Square, was originally built in 1860 as the Elmwood Hotel.*

The Elmwood Hotel (c. 1860; MACRIS WOR.1365) or Jeremiah’s Inn, as the building is known today, is a three-story Second Empire building with a Mansard roof and a charming Victorian porch. The building first appears on Ball’s map of 1860 but was first explicitly referred to as the “Elmwood Hotel” on Triscott’s 1878 map, operated by “D(avid) J. Baker.” On Sanborn’s Insurance map of 1910 it was called the Stafford Hotel and was still listed as a hotel, albeit unnamed, on the Sanborn Map of 1937; although it likely was still called by the same name, as the MACRIS report on the building includes a photograph from the 1970s with a prominent sign on the decrepit-looking building advertising the “Stafford Hotel” attached to an even more prominent sign advertising Schlitz beer. In the 1980s the building was purchased for use as a homeless shelter. Today it is called Jeremiah’s Inn, an organization whose tagline on their website is “Helping People Through our Social Model Recovery Program and Nutrition Center,” which includes a food bank, a shelter, and “residential rehabilitation recovery services.”

The Elmwood/Stafford Hotel was well-positioned at the junction of three roads in Webster Square. Cambridge Street continues east along what was called “Raccoon Plain” on Stebbins’ map of 1833, running along the north side of the Middle River until it joins Millbury Street near the place where the Middle River and Mill Brook converge to form the Blackstone River. Webster Street continues due south as the “road to Oxford” on Stebbins’s map of 1833. Finally, what is now Main Street continued west in a meandering route for a little under two miles to reach Leicester. Mill Street is absent from the Stebbins map but has appeared on Phineas Ball’s 1860 map, ending at Main Street. On Triscott’s map, the short block of Main Street (called Leicester Street on the map) opposite the A.G. Coes Manufacturing Company is listed as the property of Stella & Mary Coes, the sisters of Loring and Aury Coes. By 1910 the house on the property had been replaced by buildings labeled “tenements” on the Sanborn map, lining Main Street from Cambridge Street to Mill Street. These buildings, in turn, had been replaced by commercial buildings on the 1937 Sanborn map, which appear to be the buildings that remain along the short stretch of Main Street to Mill Street. Mill Street was pushed across Main Street through the block to Webster Street sometime in the 1980s.

Detail of the map of Worcester produced in 1795 by John Peirce and David Andrews. This section of the map shows the old road leading southwest to the border with Leicester (the red line) from the center of town, which is shown at bottom left. Note that, in this view, north is at the bottom of the map and east is to the left of the map. What is today Main Street is called the “road from Boston to New York” on the map. There are only three details provided along this section of the road. The first is a “bridge” which crosses over a stream about two miles from the center. Three roads converge just east of the bridge, which corresponds to today’s Webster Square, where Main Street, Webster Street, and Cambridge Street still converge. The bridge crosses what was called on the map “Halfway River, one rod wide” shortly after it merges with “Turkey Brook,” now called Beaver Brook. At the very top of the map Mill Brook can be seen merging with “Halfway River” and the beginning of the word “Blackstone River” is visible. “Hamilton’s Tavern” is the other prominent feature along the road, discussed in the main text of this entry.

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Halfway River

Dudley Woodbridge, who kept a record of his trip west from Boston along the Upper Boston Post Road, described his passage through Worcester in a pithy entry dated October 2, 1728: “we came in (left blank) miles to the Meetinghouse standing on the left, whence we came to Halfway river. 3 and 1/2 more miles brought us to Richardsons at Leicester.” The bridge across the “Halfway River” is one of the few prominent features along the “Road to New York” on Peirce and Andrews’s 1795 map of Worcester (shown above). Heman Stebbins specifically labeled the section of the river over which the bridge crosses “Half-way River” on his 1831 map of the area, with the “H” placed right next to the bridge, which leaves little doubt that this was the name of the body of water passing underneath the Post Road in Webster Square. Although there is consistency in these eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century sources regarding the name, later maps refer to the “Halfway River” as the “Middle River,” while others call it “Beaver Brook,” all of which makes things slightly confusing. William Lincoln, in his early History of Worcester (first published in 1837), provides a detailed description of the sometimes confusing variety of names applied to the streams, brooks, and rivers flowing through the valley around Webster Square:

“Beginning at the Southwest corner of Worcester, we meet the Kettle Brook, flowing southwardly into Ward (now the town of Auburn), and after a little progress further, we strike the main stream into which this brook empties, returning to the north, and called on the ancient records French River, till it reaches New Worcester; there it receives the waters of Tatnuck Brook and of Beaver Brook, both coming from Holden, and joining together before they unite to the river. After their junction, the river flows eastward about a mile and a half, and was called Halfway River, to the point where it receives the stream named on the proprietary records, usually Mill Brook, sometimes Danvers Brook, and very rarely Bimelick. This tributary, receiving Weasle Brook soon after it flows out from its source in North Pond, goes in a southerly direction through the village; from the junction, the main stream, swelled to a considerable volume, sometimes having the appellation of Nipmuck River, but usually called Blackstone, flows by a southeasterly course into Millbury.”¹⁷

The “Halfway River,” sometimes called Middle River or Beaver Brook, as it passes under Curtis Street, the old route of the Upper Boston Post Road in Webster Square. The river was channeled after a flood in 1955 inundated Webster Square.

The most recent US Geological Survey (USGS) map for the area, the map labeled “Worcester South” from 2024, shows a brook called Ramshorn Brook joining Kettle Brook in Auburn, after which the stream continues into Worcester as Kettle Brook. On the USGS Map, after Kettle Brook joins Beaver Brook a little east of Curtis Pond (just south of the Curtis Street bridge), the body of water from that point on is called Middle River, and becomes the Blackstone River somewhere around the junction of McKeon Road and Route 146, a little south of the junction of Interstate 290/ Route 146 and southeast of the campus of Holy Cross. This is also the location of the Blackstone Valley River Heritage Center at Worcester. This description is not much different than the naming of the various streams on the 1833 map of Heman Stebbins, who similarly lists Kettle Brook and Beaver Brook, as well as Tatnuck Brook, with the Blackstone River beginning somewhere southeast of Pakachoag Hill, where Holy Cross is currently located. The various brooks over which the road passes or once passed in Worcester (many of the smaller streams are now diverted into underground culverts) are all part of the Blackstone River watershed even if the river itself does not cross the route of the Upper Boston Post Road. Incidentally, the straight line distance, from the bridge over the stream at Curtis Street to the Blackstone River Heritage Center, where the Blackstone River technically begins, is 1.5 miles.

The sad channel of water over which the road crosses at the junction of Main Street and Curtis Street is today perhaps called the Middle River, although some maps still refer to it as Beaver Brook. Regardless of the precise name of this specific channel of water, the once significant feature on the map has been rendered sadly inconsequential by the constant modifications of the waters in the area, reminiscent of comments in a diary entry by John Adams about his friend and colleague James Putnam whose farm, located a little further west along the old road, he visited in 1771: “He does what he pleases with Meadows and Rivers of Water. He carries round the Streams wherever he pleases.” The creation of Curtis Pond and the various Coes Ponds and reservoirs shown on older maps, the channeling of the “restored” Beaver Brook after the 1955 floods, and the road widening and development around Webster Square have so diminished the river/brook that it would be easy to miss entirely this once significant crossing while passing through the area in a vehicle.

Fortunately, I am walking along the old road, so I manage to find the slowly flowing Halfway River, as I prefer to call it, as well as discovering that the old road itself has been substantially altered in this area. Curtis Street, which is a short (less than 300 yard) road that curves south from Main Street at the bridge over Halfway River before rejoining Main Street just before the very busy intersection with Park Street and Stafford Street, was the original route of the Upper Boston Post Road. This is clear from Stebbins’s map, which in 1833 shows the road dipping south along the northern edge of Curtis Pond before curving back north just before reaching the turnoff for the Stafford Turnpike, today’s Stafford Street. The dip in the road is still present in 1860 on Ball’s map, where a half-dozen factory buildings line the road next to Curtis Pond. However, by 1878, the straighter road called “Leicester Street” corresponding to today’s Main Street has been built, as it appears on Triscott’s map along with the old curved road, essentially in its modern configuration.

*The original route of the Upper Boston Post Road in this section of Worcester followed Curtis Street, a short street in Webster Square.*

The historic structure report for the Curtis and Main Street bridge over what is called Beaver Brook in the report (written in August, 2000; MACRIS #WOR.9046), is justifiably unimpressed with either the bridge or with the neighborhood: “a somewhat atypical example of what is now a common, modern structural type; less than fifty years old, and not among the earliest examples of this type in the MassHighway bridge database. Located in an altered and unappealing mid-late 20th-century commercial/industrial setting.” The property between Curtis Street and Curtis Pond is a large and unappealing fenced-off lot with high tension wires running through it on tall pylons, consistent with the 1937 Sanborn map, which lists the property as part of the “Worcester Electric Light Company.” Curtis Pond is barely visible a few yards away through the scrubby brush lining the reconstructed shore. The semicircle between Main Street and Curtis Street on the right-hand side of the old road was the location of the car barns of the Consolidated Street Railway Company as shown on the 1910 Sanborn map; now the area is occupied principally by a used car lot, although there are one or two shabby commercial buildings and what appears to be new construction in an empty lot facing Main Street. The only frisson of excitement about this little detour is that it does not follow the straight line of Main Street for a few yards; on the whole, this is a forlorn and run down stretch of road, much like the weak flow of the forlorn and canalized Halfway River over which the road passes. The promise implied by the prominence given this crossing on the old map is so much more exciting than the current reality. Such is the reality of much of the route of the old road, particularly in this liminal zone between city and suburb.

Forlorn is the kindest possible word I could use to describe the next section of the road, which passes through the extremely busy intersection of Main Street, Park Street, and Stafford Street. The busy four-lane Park Street was not pushed through the area until after 1910, as it does not appear on the Sanborn map of 1910, but is present on the map from 1937. Today it is also part of Route 9, which followed the old Worcester Turnpike from Boston into Lincoln Square in Worcester. Route 9 then passed the old court house and continued along Highland Street to reach Park Street, then followed Park Street to this intersection. Route 9 continues from here along Main Street into Leicester, beginning on the west side of this busy intersection, which a small plaque tells me is called Gardner Square. Route 9 and the route of the Upper Boston Post Road runs roughly together, separating every once in a while as the old road meanders along the occasional forgotten byway, for the next twenty miles before the two routes separate again in West Brookfield. If the twenty miles of the Upper Boston Post Road from Watertown to Northborough was roughly synonymous with Route 20, the next twenty miles are roughly in the same path as Route 9.

While Main Street/Route 9 is the path of the Upper Boston Post Road west from Worcester, Stafford Street is the principal road leading southwest from this ugly intersection, which has a gas station located on one corner, a Burger King on another, an empty former used-car lot on another corner, and various drab commercial buildings occupying the remaining spaces along the roads that intersect here at an awkward angle. The junction of Main Street and Stafford Street, despite appearances, occupies an extremely important place in the history of the Upper Boston Post Road.

Detail from an earlier map of Worcester, produced in 1831, by Heman Stebbins (compare with his map of 1833 shown earlier in this entry). This section of the map shows the roads leading out of Worcester west of Webster Square. The route to New York In the eighteenth century followed the route of the Upper Boston Post Road west to Springfield. The road to New York then continued south from Springfield to Hartford along the Connecticut River, and then on to New Haven, where the route of the Upper Boston Post Road and the Lower Boston Post Road merged. A single Boston Post Road continued from New Haven to New York. The “old road” shown (labeled with the words “old road” written up side down) at the top left of the map is Apricot Street, the original route of the “Road to New York” shown on the 1795 map of Peirce and Andrews (see the previous map). Sometime in the early nineteenth century two changes occurred: the first was the rerouting of the “old road” away from Apricot Street along a lower road that skirted the banks of Kettle Brook, most of which is today Main Street (Route 9) into Leicester. This is the road on the map labeled “to Albany, Springfield, and Northampton.” The second change was the opening of the Stafford Turnpike in 1810, which created a more direct route to Hartford and led to a shift in traffic away from the old route to Springfield. The Stafford Turnpike passed through Sturbridge and connected with turnpikes in Connecticut, which reduced the distance and the time of travel to Hartford from Worcester, substantially changing the historic route of travel to New York.

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Stafford Turnpike

For more than a century the main road to New York from Boston via Worcester continued west along Main Street here at the busy intersection of Main Street, Park Avenue, and Stafford Street in Worcester. However, a glance at the map of Worcester from 1831 by Heman Stebbins, shown above, distinguishes between three roads, The “old road,” the “road to Albany, Springfield, and Northampton,” and the “Stafford Turnpike via Hartford to New York.” The “old road,” the Upper Boston Post Road, was no longer the road to New York as it was forty years earlier on the 1795 map of Worcester by Peirce and Andrews, and as it had been when George Washington passed through Worcester on his way to Boston in 1775 and in 1789.

In 1806, a corporation was formed to create a more direct route from Worcester to Hartford and by March 1810 the Worcester and Stafford Turnpike was opened. The road followed the “straight-line principle” used in the design of most of the turnpikes of this era, cutting directly across the landscape in a line that, for the most part, ignored any natural barriers such as hills or rivers. Frederic J. Wood, writing in his 1919 classic The Turnpikes of New England, states: “That it was an important road serving a prosperous territory is plainly evident. Much of the travel over the ‘northern route’ from Boston to New York must have been diverted to the Worcester and Stafford, as the new route was much more direct between Worcester and Hartford.”¹⁸ The route of the newer road passed through Sturbridge, Massachusetts and ended in Stafford, Connecticut, where turnpikes in Connecticut continued on to Hartford. The newer route cut the distance from the point where the Stafford Turnpike and the Old Post Road separated in Worcester to Hartford from a little over seventy miles to about sixty miles. The newer route ran roughly along the same path that remains the main “upper” route from Boston to New York, which follows the Massachusetts Turnpike (Interstate 90) from Boston to Sturbridge, then continues on to Interstate 84 from Sturbridge to Hartford, then along Interstate 91 from Hartford to New Haven, where the “upper route” meets Interstate 95, the “lower route” from Boston, and the upper and lower routes merge to follow Interstate 95 from New Haven into New York City.

An important junction: looking west from the intersection of Stafford Street (left) and Main Street (right) in Worcester. Stafford Street was opened in 1810 as the Worcester and Stafford Turnpike, providing a more direct link between Worcester, Massachusetts and Hartford, Connecticut. The new road diverted traffic away from the old road, the Upper Boston Post Road to Springfield, which is Main Street in this photograph. Also visible in the photograph, between the two roads, is the Ichabod Washburn Hospice Residence, while the spire of Our Lady of the Angels Catholic Church is visible, on the north side of Main Street, to the right in the photograph.

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The “upper route” from Boston to New York was permanently altered after 1810, when construction of the Worcester and Stafford Turnpike was completed. Sturbridge became a major stopping point on the newer road, and the taverns in towns along the old road such as Leicester, Spencer, and the Brookfields, became less important. Sturbridge, despite being located at the intersection of two major interstate highways, is a fine old town with an interesting collection of old houses, a great old coaching inn called the Publick House Historic Inn, and Old Sturbridge Village, a historic museum that attempts to recreate life in the early nineteenth century. The literature for the Publick House pushes the narrative that it was an important stopping place for travelers from Boston to New York. Indeed no less a personage than the Marquis de Lafayette visited Sturbridge on his way from Boston to New York during his famous tour of the country in 1824. Lafayette had stopped in Worcester on the morning of Friday September 4, 1824 and was feted both at the Oaks, the mansion of the Paine family (see Worcester, Part One), and at the house of Governor Lincoln along Main Street (see Worcester, Part Two). Around 2 p.m. Lafayette “entered his coach amid the loud and reiterated cheering of the citizens, and was accompanied by the committee about four miles on his way to New York, where they took their leave of him.” A select group of officials “accompanied Lafayette as far as Sturbridge, on the route through New Worcester, Clappville, (now Rochdale,) and Stafford Springs, Ct., over the old Stafford turnpike, to New York.”¹⁹

However, despite the claims that it was an important stopping place in colonial New England, almost all travelers from Boston to New York in the eighteenth century took one of two routes: the Lower Boston Post Road via Dedham, Providence, and New London, Connecticut, or the Upper Boston Post Road via Worcester, Springfield, and Hartford, Connecticut to reach New Haven and points beyond. Although the towns along the Stafford Turnpike date to the colonial era, the history of travel through Sturbridge, Massachusetts and Stafford Springs, Connecticut is predominantly an early nineteenth-century story, which also happens to coincide with the era of the stagecoach, another form of transportation that is often mistakenly traced back to Colonial America. The turnpike and the stagecoach are interesting topics deserving of study, but my interests lie in the older road, the road taken in the eighteenth century, the road of Washington, of Adams, of Sewall, the oldest road west from Boston, the Upper Boston Post Road.²⁰

An aerial photograph of the Webster Square area from the photo archives of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. This photograph from 1953 looks east toward the junction of Stafford Street, Main Street, and Park Avenue. Curtis Pond is located to the right of Stafford Street, originally the old Stafford Turnpike. Our Lady of the Angels Catholic Church is prominent at left on Main Street, the route of the Upper Boston Post Road. On the south side of Main Street, across from the church, are the buildings of the Washburn Residence and the Goddard Retirement House. At top right is the white roof of the Worcester Arena, located on the former estate of Loring Coes and today housing Arena Plaza. The most prominent feature on the map is the massive lot in the foreground between Main Street and Stafford Street that became Webster Square Plaza.

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Il vecchio è meglio del nuovo

Lafayette visited Worcester a second time nine months later, after his exhaustive trip around the United States, a trip which has been recreated on a website dedicated to the Lafayette Trail. According to Caleb Wall, writing in the 1870s, Lafayette traveled along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road on this occasion: “Lafayette’s second visit to Worcester was made June 15, 1825, when he passed through here from Albany on his way to Boston, to assist in laying the corner stone of the Bunker Hill monument, traveling day and night from the west, by rapid stage coaches, with frequent change of horses, in order to be on hand in season to participate in those august ceremonies. He rode from Rice’s Hotel in Brookfield, in a coach driven by a veteran knight of the whip, Samuel D. Phelps, recently deceased, who was a stage driver over fifty years ago for Maj. Simeon Burt, the successor of Col. Reuben Sikes as proprietor of the stage lines, then passing through Worcester. Lafayette was accompanied by his son, George Washington Lafayette, and his private secretary, Levasseur. They arrived in Worcester about two o’clock in the morning of June 15. Lafayette and suite took a brief repose and breakfasted at the old Exchange Hotel, then called the Exchange Coffee House and proceeded early in the forenoon to Boston, where they arrived before night, stopping at the residence of U. S. Senator, James Lloyd.”²¹

This is the route by which George Washington traveled through Worcester on his two visits and was the route John Adams took on the journeys to New York and Philadelphia recorded in his diaries. In the spring of 1771, Adams also visited the less well-known town of Stafford Springs, Connecticut, the town at the end of the Worcester and Stafford Turnpike, but his trip took him along the old road west through Leicester, Spencer, and Brookfield, as the Stafford Turnpike lay forty years in the future.²² Adams, who was struggling with poor health at the time, made the journey to Stafford Springs because the mineral springs for which the town was named were held to have curative properties.²³ This was the first trip Adams had made to Worcester since his student days (when Adams lived in Worcester from August 1755 until October 1758) and he spent some time catching up with old acquaintances, such as Gardner Chandler (discussed in Worcester, part three), and James Putnam, with whom he studied law. Putnam lived across from the meeting house on Worcester Common, but maintained a farm outside of town, which Adams visited on June 1, 1771. This was the visit in which Adams commented upon Putnam’s penchant for moving the path of streams and brooks around on his property, a quote which begins this entry.

Detail of map of Worcester by Samuel Triscott produced in 1878. This section shows the route of the Upper Boston Post Road, shown as “Leicester Street,” from Webster Square west to the border with Leicester. The Stafford Turnpike is also shown heading southwest just above Curtis Pond. Places discussed in the entry along the road include the “old Gents Home,” the Curtis house, Gates Lane, Leicester Street, Solomon Parsons and the cider mills, and the split of the old upper road and the lower road to Leicester.

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The existence of meadows, streams, and “Rivers of Water” indicate that the farm was likely somewhere along this section of the road. Caleb Wall, in his discussion of the area, provides numerous clues about the location of the Putnam farm. In Wall’s description of the Stafford Turnpike, he refers to “Oliver Curtis, the keeper of the old toll gate on the Stafford turnpike, a little south west of New Worcester, who had three sons, (Oliver, Jr, Edward, and Joseph.) and was son of Rev. Philip Curtis, minister of the old church in Sharon from 1743 to 1797. Oliver Curtis, senior, came here from Sharon a short time before the turnpike was opened, some seventy-five years ago, when his sons were very young, and took charge of the old toll gate which stood near his residence, from the opening of the turnpike to its close. His son Joseph for several years kept tavern in the old DeLand house, being the last owner and keeper of it previous to Charles M. DeLand.”²⁴ After a description of the Stearns/DeLand tavern, a topic covered earlier in this entry, Wall returns to the Curtis family: “Oliver Curtis, senior, died in 1835, his old mansion and toll gate long afterwards remaining as memorials of the past. His sons Oliver, jr., and Edward resided upon their father’s estate until their decease. Oliver dying in 1866 and Edward in 1872, both at the age of 74. Joseph Curtis, the youngest brothers, who died in 1871, aged 70, kept the hotel at New Worcester from 1824 to 1830. He bought it of Dea(con) Uriah Stone, who kept it a few years after buying it of the original owner, Charles Stearns. Joseph Curtis sold the estate to C.M. DeLand some forty years ago and afterwards resided upon the estate at New Worcester owned before the revolution by attorney General James Putnam, which was purchased of the confiscating authorities by Asa Ward (grandfather of Artemas Ward, Register of Deeds from 1821 to 1846), who resided there until his death in 1818.”²⁵

Stebbins shows a “J. Curtis” residence at the “3 mile” marker on the road out to Leicester, a little past the junction with the Stafford Turnpike, on his 1833 map (see above). Ball also showed a “J. Curtis” on his map of 1860 in roughly the same area, on the north side of Main Street between the the Stafford Turnpike and what is today Gates Lane. The City of Worcester Directory for 1860 (p. 62 ) and for 1865 (p. 58) list a Joseph Curtis as a “farmer” living on Leicester Street, the name at the time for this section of Main Street. A property along the north side of “Leicester Street” between what is now called Montague Street and Gates Lane is listed as belonging to “Curtis” on Triscott’s map of 1878, although Joseph Curtis had died in 1871. There are also numerous streams crossing Main Street in the area, which is consistent with Adams’ description of Putnam’s farm. It seems likely that the Putnam farm once occupied a significant amount of the land west of the intersection of Main Street and Stafford Street, although there is little evidence today of the former estate. Even the water has been removed, likely channeled underground into culverts running down into Kettle Brook or Curtis Pond.

The detailed maps of Phineas Ball (1860) and Samuel Triscott (1878) end at the junction of Main Street and the Stafford Turnpike. Although the two men mapped Worcester in its entirety (see the detail from Triscott’s map above), the maps of the “skirts” of Worcester are much-less detailed, likely because this area was much less developed in the nineteenth century. Stebbins shows only nine buildings on his map of 1833 along the final 1.5 miles of the Upper Boston Post Road in Worcester before the road crosses into the town of Leicester. Triscott’s map shows about twenty houses west along the 1.5 miles of the road from the junction with Stafford Street to the border with Leicester. Although development had expanded into the area by 1910, the Sanborn maps still show a significant number of undeveloped lots along both sides of the road. Evidence of the developed landscape that we see today along Main Street does not appear on maps of the area until the 1937 Sanborn map.

*Washburn Hospice Residences (1895) at 1183 Main Street.*

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The Old and the New

Today, an empty paved lot fills the corner created by the junction of Stafford Street and Main Street, while a Burger King, a Burrito restaurant in a commercial space fronting a late-nineteenth-century house, and a long vinyl-covered commercial building line the north side of Main Street leading away from the busy junction. After this inauspicious start, things improve slightly as there are a couple of older institutional buildings that perk up the otherwise drab architecture of the area. The first building, on the south side of Main Street at 1183 Main Street, is an elegant redbrick mansion housing the Ichabod Washburn Hospice Residences. Originally called the Washburn Home for Aged Women (MACRIS #WOR.1353), the building was completed in 1895 at a cost of $50,000 with money from a bequest by the noted Worcester manufacturer Ichabod Washburn. The home moved to this new location out in the “country” from its original location 2.5 miles away, on Worcester Common, as downtown real estate had become expensive and the center of the city increasingly crowded.²⁶

*Bethany Congregational Church (1892), 1189 Main Street, Worcester. Today the building houses the Christ Tabernacle Apostolic Church congregation.*

The Home for Aged Women also was conveniently located next door to what was shown on Triscott’s map of 1878 (see above) as the “Old Gents Home.” Charles Nutt, writing in 1919 states that “a splendid new Home is now being erected on the old location through the generosity of Harry W. Goddard, in memory of his father.”²⁷ This is clearly the building today located at 1199 Main Street, the Goddard House Retirement Community, with the word “Goddard” carved into the facade. Between the two homes is the diminutive church building first opened in 1892 as Bethany Congregational Church. Nutt tells us that “the church was organized in 1891, in which year Rev. Joseph Walker became pastor. He was succeeded in 1892 by Rev. Henry E. Barnes. From 1893 to 1914 Rev. Albert G. Todd was pastor. Rev. Frederick K. Brown has been pastor since 1915. The place of worship was originally on Leicester street, now Main street. The chapel at 1189 Main street was occupied first in 1892.”²⁸ Today the building is occupied by the Christ Tabernacle Apostolic Church.

On the opposite side of Main Street from the Goddard House and the Bethany Church is the impressive Our Lady of the Angels Church. The parish was founded in 1916, and the current building was opened in 1927, one of 124 parishes that make up the Roman Catholic Diocese of Worcester. As I discussed in the previous entry, the Congregational Church was the only game in town for the first century of life in Worcester. St. John’s parish in Worcester, which opened its first building in 1832 as Christ Church and moved to its current building on Temple Street near Union Station in 1845, was the first Catholic parish created in central and western Massachusetts. The juxtaposition of this large and ornate church on the western edge of Worcester across Main Street from the diminutive former home of Bethany Congregation is a stark indicator of the shifting political and cultural influence of the respective social groups who worshiped in the buildings by the early twentieth century.

A small plaque on the steps of the church indicate that the poet Elizabeth Bishop “lived in her grandparents house on this site in 1917-18.” Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was born in Worcester, but her father died shortly after her birth and her mother was institutionalized in 1916. After being sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia for a year, she was returned to Worcester where she lived for a year with her father’s parents at their “enormous home at 1212 Main Street. She recalled it as ‘gloomy’ and ‘dismal,’ partly because her dead father had grown up there. It was twice as large as the house where she had lived in Nova Scotia, ‘with two windows for each of the Nova Scotia ones and a higher roof,’ as well as many wings, porches, and fire-places, a library, a sewing room, and a billiard room. The 150-year-old building, originally a farmhouse, sat on 15 acres of land that included an apple orchard, a summerhouse, a carriage house, and a barn for cows and chickens.”²⁹ Bishop’s grandfather, John Wilson Bishop, is described in Nutt’s History of Worcester as “one of the foremost builders and contractors of New England,” lived in the large house, which was demolished to make way for Our Lady of Angels Church.³⁰ The location, age, and size of the estate suggest the possibility that this was the house built by James Putnam later owned by Joseph Curtis, on the large farm that Adams visited in 1771.

Our Lady of the Angels Catholic Church (1927), at 1222 Main Street, was built on the fifteen-acre estate of John Wilson Bishop, grandfather of the poet Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop lived at the 150 year-old farmhouse briefly in 1917-18, a house which may have been built by James Putnam and visited by John Adams in 1771.

Webster Square once referred to the intersection of Main, Webster, and Cambridge Streets, but has long since become a name for the entire neighborhood west of the intersection. This very expansive definition includes the entire remainder of the route of the Upper Boston Post Road in Worcester. That the definition of Webster Square has expanded is clearly illustrated as I pass the enormous Webster Square Plaza, which takes up all of the property between the old Stafford turnpike and the south side of Main Street from Young Street to Gates Lane, the latter street located 0.7 miles west of the original junction that gives the area its name.

The gigantic footprint of the shopping mall obscures the fact that this area was principally developed as a residential neighborhood. Away from Main Street, the streets are lined with buildings ranging from single family Victorians put up in the 1880s and 1890s to triple-decker and six-family apartment buildings that began to appear around 1900. Little of this architecture has been deemed worthy of a historic structure report and, in truth, the houses that line the road to Leicester are not particularly interesting, unless you are a student of vinyl-covered triple-deckers or Victorian houses with commercial structures attached to the front built out to the street in the space where a front lawn would normally be found. The few houses of historic interest, like the Bishop estate, have essentially disappeared from the landscape, replaced by a twentieth century landscape. The sole report in the MACRIS database about any residential buildings along the last 1.5 miles of the old road into Leicester is the report for two Victorian houses that flank Montague Street on the north side of Main Street. The Erastus Woodis Cottage (WOR.1355; 1883; 1200 Main Street) and the Edward Comins House (WOR.1354; 1887; 1194 Main Street) are “two well-preserved examples of two popular house-types of the 1880s, a period during which this section of Main Street was named Leicester Street.” Today both have been extensively modified; one has a concrete commercial addition and the other has a large deck attached to the side, and both houses are covered in vinyl-siding. These are two of the highlights among the houses along this section of the road, which gives the reader an indication of the quality of the rest of the housing encountered along Main Street.

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Worcester By Numbers

As I discussed in the previous entry, Worcester expanded rapidly in the nineteenth century. In 1850 the population of the city counted 17,049 residents but by 1900 the population had climbed to 118,421 residents, all needing a place to live. The population rose to a high of 203,486 residents by 1950, and it was during this fifty-year period that the bulk of the housing in the Webster Square area was built. After World War Two the population began to shrink as people moved to the suburbs, including the towns of Leicester and Spencer, the next towns west along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road.

The city of Worcester has since regained all of the population it lost in the second half of the twentieth century and today has reached a peak population of 207,621 residents (2023 US Census data estimate). The importance of Worcester has declined though as many other cities have grown in the intervening decades. Worcester was the 40th largest city in America in 1850, and had grown to become the 29th largest city by 1900. Although the city continued to grow, by 1910 Worcester had fallen to 33rd on the list, passed by newer cities like Atlanta, Georgia and Oakland, California. In 1950, when Worcester reached its high point in population, the city had fallen to 50th in the list of large American cities. Despite having surpassed its previous highest population in the 2020 US Census, Worcester now ranks as the 116th largest city in America, behind rapidly-growing Salt Lake City (#114), and just ahead of Rochester, New York (#117), another older northeastern once-thriving industrial city.

The Worcester Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), a rough approximation of the influence and extent of a city in the surrounding area, is contiguous with Worcester County. The Worcester MSA had a population of 866,866 residents in 2023, the latest available data from the US Census. This ranked Worcester as the 69th largest MSA in the country. Providence, Rhode Island, the perennial rival with Worcester for the second-most important city in New England, was ranked in the 2020 US Census as the 134th largest city in America and the third-largest city in New England, with 190,792 residents. However, the Providence MSA, with 1,677,803 residents in 2023, was ranked as the 39th largest MSA in the United States, twice as large as Worcester. Both the Providence MSA and the Worcester MSA are subsumed under the larger Combined Statistical Area (CSA) centered around Boston. Boston is the 24th largest city in the country, the 11th largest MSA in the country (incorporating Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex, Middlesex, and Plymouth County in Massachusetts, plus Rockingham and Stafford County in New Hampshire), with a population of 4,919,179 residents, and the 7th largest CSA in the country (8,345,067 residents), sitting above Houston (7.7 million), but trailing Dallas (8.7 million), San Francisco (9.0 million), Chicago (9.8 million), Washington (10.1 million), Los Angeles (18.3 million), and New York (21.9 million residents). I think of CSA’s as the area that roots for a specific sports team. The very largest CSAs, like New York or Los Angeles, often have two or more teams within the area, such is their heft. Others like Boston and Philadelphia are still large and influential metropolitan areas, but have fallen behind the largest and are being overtaken by younger and faster-growing cities like Dallas. Other cities like Houston, Atlanta, and Miami are behind Boston at the moment but are catching up at a rapid rate.

*A sign of the times: White & Brite Cleaners, 1256 Main Street, Worcester.*

The main point of all the data in the preceding paragraph is to give readers a sense of when and how the city of Worcester grew to its current state and, specifically, to explain when and why this particular area along the Post Road developed. As we shall see when we reach Leicester, a satellite town in the Worcester MSA, although there are a few eighteenth-century houses and a few more nineteenth-century houses, the road is increasingly lined with developments that date from the second half of the twentieth century, consistent with the rapid expansion of the population of suburban neighborhoods and towns after World War Two, enabled largely by the automobile. Most of the inhabitants of Worcester and the neighboring towns are members of Red Sox nation, and not just because the AAA WooSox play at Polar Park in Worcester. As I explained above, the local sports team is the best measure of the most expansive definition of Boston, the CSA definition. Ironically, this fairly tenuous link to Boston, principally the result of car culture, is what gives me license to ramble about this far-flung neighborhood fifty miles away from the dome of the State House on Beacon Hill.

Part of the appeal of this neighborhood on the “edge” of town was the ease of access to transportation along Main Street to the businesses and factories closer to the center of Worcester. At the northeast corner of Main Street and Gates Lane, as shown on the Sanborn map of 1910, were the car barns of the Worcester Consolidated Street Railway Company. Today the streetcars have been replaced by the automobile, and the streetcar barns have been replaced by the fields and swimming pool of the Veterans Memorial Bennnett State Pool and Field. Webster Square Plaza across the street is certainly a late-twentieth century addition to the landscape that has been enabled by the automobile, as evidenced from the massive parking lot. One of the more interesting commercial buildings along Main Street in the Webster Square area is directly across the street from the large shopping center and next door to the swimming pool, at 1256 Main Street. The last property along the old road to Leicester and Springfield listed in the MACRIS database for Worcester is the modern building housing White & Brite Cleaners (MACRIS # WOR.2105; c. 1960). The report considers the building architecturally significant as a “true expression of the automobile age, this ephemeral building is located on a highway and is surrounded by ample parking space. A broad cantilevered driveway canopy flies up and away from the almost insignificant building to support the structure’s most important feature, a large neon sign which can easily be seen from Route 9. An excellent example of 1950’s and 1960’s ‘commercial strip’ architecture, this store is as much a sign as it is a building. The glass enclosed office, enamelled metal sides and the turquoise and white painted exposed steel beams supporting the canopy are really typical of the period.”

The Gates Lane School next door to the cleaners, the modern building replacing the original school Elizabeth Bishop attended for first grade, is named for the road ahead that leads north away from Main Street. Gates Lane in turn is named for the Gates family who first settled in the area when Simon Gates arrived in the town of Worcester in 1749, and “and settled on the old homestead at the head of Gates’ lane, running north from Leicester street, near New Worcester. Their son, Simon Gates, died Feb. 1849 aged 93, in the same room in which he was born. They have numerous descendants.”³¹ It is perhaps unsurprising that the Gates name has popped up continually as I walk the old road through Worcester; there is also a Gates Street, along the eastern boundary of University Park near Clark, named for a member of the family who had a farm in the area, as I discussed in the previous entry. The mother of Aury Gates Coes and Loring Coes was Roxanna Gates, who was born in the house at the end of the lane named for the family. The Gates farm is shown at the distinctive curved end of Gates Lane on Stebbins map of 1833 (S. Gates is listed as the owner, presumably Simon who died in 1849), on Ball’s map of 1860 (D.R. Gates), and on Triscott’s map of 1878 (where it is the “Milk Farm” of H.T. Gates). The Sanborn map of 1937 showed that Gates Lane no longer ended at the Gates farm, but had been extended to Mill Street, although the old house and barn appear to still have existed at the time as the sole buildings along the road after it curves eastward. Today the road is lined with ranch houses mostly built after World War Two, when cars enabled people to live further out of the city and within a short drive of the Webster Square Plaza and the White & Brite Cleaners.

Detail from Stebbins map of 1831 showing the “old road” and the road to “Albany by Springfield and Northampton.” The old road is today’s Apricot Street and is the original route of the Upper Boston Post Road from Worcester into Leicester.

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Mile 51: The Old Road to New York

After Gates Lane the road begins a long and sometimes steep uphill climb out of the valley. From the low point of 480 feet above sea level, at the Curtis Street bridge over Beaver Brook, the old road slowly gains elevation to reach 518 feet above sea level at the junction of Main Street and Gates Lane. In the quarter mile from Gates Lane to Apricot Street, the point at which the old route of the Upper Boston Post Road leaves Main Street (and Route 9) in Worcester, the road climbs to an elevation of 602 feet above sea level, the highest point along the road since the first of the five entries I have written about Worcester, when I first descended into the valley in which the town of Worcester is principally situated. The climb continues all the way to the border with Leicester, where the road reaches an elevation of 787 feet above sea level, the highest point of the entire journey thus far along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road.

One block beyond Gates Lane, near Brookline Street, is the end of Mile 50 along the Upper Boston Post Road. From this spot to the border with Leicester is almost one mile, the final mile of my walk in Worcester. Heading uphill and getting past the busy Webster Square Plaza certainly gives the impression that I am heading out of Worcester. There are almost no buildings shown along the section of Main Street from Gates Lane to Apricot Street on the maps of Stebbins (1833), Ball (1860), or of Triscott (1878). The Sanborn insurance maps show that by 1910 the entire area had been subdivided into lots and that many, but not all, of the lots along the road had been developed. Some, like the six two-family houses from 1286-1296 Main Street are quite substantial and well-built dwellings and remain in good shape today. Most of the lots were developed into the ubiquitous triple-deckers that are a hallmark of Worcester (and New England) architecture. Scattered along Main Street are various commercial buildings housing convenience stores, hair salons, and gas stations. All in all, it is not a particularly exciting walk.

Stephen Jenkins, in his book The Old Boston Post Road, published in 1913, traveled along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road from New York to Boston. Leaving Leicester, Jenkins described the route he followed: “The road into Worcester passes through Cherry Valley and New Worcester, though the old Post Road used to climb up over a hill. At Cherry Valley was Jones’s Tavern, well-known in the coaching days and still remembered by the older inhabitants.”³² There is a lot to unpack in these few sentences so I will break it down into smaller points in this section. Unfortunately, when I reach the junction of Main Street and Apricot Street the Sanborn insurance maps from 1910 cease to cover the remaining area, an indication that there were insufficient buildings to merit a map, but also making it difficult to follow the fate of the older buildings along this last section of the Upper Boston Post Road in Worcester. However, there are still plenty of maps that can help solve the question of the route of the Upper Boston Post Road out of Worcester and into Leicester, including the map of Worcester produced by John Peirce and David Andrews in 1795, the maps produced by Heman Stebbins in 1831 and in 1833, the map of Phineas Ball from 1860, the map of Samuel Triscott from 1878, and the Sanborn Insurance maps of 1936-37, which extended to the border with Leicester, not to mention USGS Topographical maps from various dates covering more than a century.

The first question that needs to be answered is why is there a discussion at all about the original route of the “old Post Road” out of Worcester? That this is indeed a problem needing a solution becomes apparent as I arrive at the point where Main Street (and Route 9) splits from Apricot Street, the latter street heading steeply uphill to the border with Leicester. Main Street, on the other hand, skirts the hill for the most part by following closely along the northern bank of Kettle Brook, through an area called Cherry Valley that includes parts of the town of Leicester and of the City of Worcester. To complicate matters there is a split further along Main Street, where a narrow old road called Great Post Road follows a slightly more elevated route into Leicester for nearly half a mile before rejoining Main Street in Leicester.

Three different roads, all with some claim to be the route of the Upper Boston Post Road with one called Great Post Road, makes things very complicated. The rule of thumb I have used for this entire project is that the path of least resistance is usually the best and most often the correct answer. That would seem to exclude Apricot Street as a possible route, as it climbs from 602 feet above sea level to 797 feet above sea level over the 0.7 miles from the split with Main Street to the border with Leicester, before the road, called Sargent Street in Leicester, descends to 710 feet when it rejoins Main Street 1.1 miles after the two roads split in Worcester. Incidentally, the distance between the junctions is 1.1 miles regardless of whether one follows Main Street or Apricot Street.

Detail from the 1939 USGS Topographical map for “South Worcester.” This section shows the various roads leading from Worcester to Leicester in the area called Cherry Valley, discussed in the entry. The top road leading away from the junction (near the word MAIN) is Apricot Street, the original route of the Upper Boston Post Road. Notice how steeply the “old road” climbs. Sometime in the early 1800s Main Street was continued along a lower path, near Kettle Brook. This is the lower road shown; notice how steeply the landscape rises up to the north of the road, indicating it was squeezed into a narrow area between the brook, which had by now been dammed (notice the pond at left), and Parsons Hill. By 1939 the road had been moved again; notice the (newer) lower road has a thin companion (older) road just above it, which is today called Great Post Road in Worcester and Locust Street in Leicester. All three roads converge in Leicester (at left) and continue as one road, which is also Route 9 for about twenty miles, through Leicester, Spencer, East Brookfield, and Brookfield, before Route 9 and the Upper Boston Post Road separate for good in the town of West Brookfield.

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However, it turns out that Jenkins is correct when he says the “old Post Road used to climb up over a hill.” The first and most important piece of evidence is the map of Heman Stebbins from 1831 shown above. On this map Stebbins shows the split that is today the Main Street and Apricot Street split. He refers to the lower road, what is now basically Main Street (with exceptions that I will address shortly), as the continuation of the road “To Albany by Springfield and Northampton.” The reader will recall that the Stafford Turnpike had become the road “to Hartford and New York” after it opened in 1810. The lower road, Main Street, had also clearly become the main road west by 1831, replacing what Stebbins clearly marks as the “old road,” a road which is clearly shown climbing a hill on the map, a road that corresponds to Apricot Street. Caleb Wall, in his Reminiscences of Worcester (1877), states that “Apricot street was a part of the oldest traveled thoroughfare and stage route between Boston and New York, through Worcester.”³³

There is also evidence that predates the Stebbins map of 1831, and which is corroborated by Wall and other local historians. Although the 1795 map of Worcester by Peirce and Andrews is light on detail, there is one crucial detail that helps solve the riddle of which path the old road followed, the presence of a tavern along the road close to the border with Leicester. “Hamilton’s Tavern” is shown as the road takes a slight curve about two-thirds of the distance along from the bridge over “Halfway River.” Caleb Wall also tells us that “Asa Hamilton, father of Capt. Charles A. Hamilton, kept a hotel between 1794 and 1800 in the ‘Solomon Parsons house,’ on Apricot street, a little west of the old Jones tavern.”³⁴ Stebbins more detailed map of 1833 shows four houses along the short stretch of what is now Apricot Street from the junction with Main Street to a creek that crosses both the upper “old road” and the lower “new road.” The first building is “J. Jones Tave(ern),” a tavern kept by three generations of the Jones family as we shall soon see. Then there is the house of “F. Rockwood” sandwiched between two houses, both listed as “S. Parson’s.” One of these two houses is the house of “Solomon Parsons, above named, who came to Worcester from Leicester in 1812, and settled on the estate between Cherry Valley and New Worcester, previously owned and occupied by Reuben and Asa Hamilton, (grandfather and father of the present Charles A. Hamilton).”³⁵ The house of Solomon Parsons is about 2/3 of the way along the road from the bridge over Beaver Brook to the border with Leicester, consistent with the location of Hamilton’s Tavern on the 1795 map.

The house of “S. Parsons” is shown on Ball’s map of 1860 (see below), just east of the brook running across the road. Ball also shows a road directly across the street from the Parsons house connecting Apricot Street and Main Street, a road that corresponds to the narrow lane today called Armandale Street. Triscott also shows both the Parsons house and the small connector road, which is called Parsons Lane on an earlier map Triscott produced in 1874 (not shown) and in City Directories until 1880. The 1937 Sanborn Insurance map (#226) shows a large farm directly opposite Armandale Street. One of the buildings on the property is labeled “cider mill,” a product the Parsons family was known to produce. We will return to the Parsons farm shortly, but it is clear from this evidence that Apricot Street is the original route of the Upper Boston Post Road.

Let me take a moment to consider the other two roads as options for the route of the Upper Boston Post Road. Main Street on Stebbins’ map is clearly the newer road in 1831. It passes very close to Kettle Brook even today. In the early eighteenth century the flow of Kettle Brook was modified by the construction of multiple dams, at least three of which were upstream in Leicester, as we shall see in the next entry. It is my hypothesis that, before the dams were built, Kettle Brook was a fast-flowing stream that ran close to a steep-sided hill, preventing the construction of a road through Cherry Valley, also referred to as “Valley Falls” on earlier maps of Worcester, and necessitating a climb over the hill into Leicester. The dams reduced the flow of Kettle Brook and, coupled with a surge of interest in road-building in the early nineteenth century, allowed sufficient space (perhaps with some modification to the landscape) to build a new road, a road that became Great Post Road (and Locust Street in Leicester). Later modifications in the area allowed the road to be straightened, widened, and lowered, creating a newer Main Street running a little lower than Great Post Road, roughly today’s Main Street (Route 9) from Worcester into Leicester. I will return to this topic in the next entry as most of this newer road is actually in the town of Leicester.

Detail of Phineas Ball’s 1860 map of Worcester. This section of the map shows Leicester Street (now Main Street) and Apricot (spelled “Apricott” on the map) Street near the border with Leicester. From right to left, buildings discussed in this entry include: “I. Curtis,” which was likely the farmhouse built by James Putnam; “D.R. Gates,” the farm at the end of what is clearly Gates Lane; “W. Ward,” the house in which Robert Goddard was born; “E. Curtis” which is the house once operated as Jones Tavern; and “S. Parsons,” which was once Hamilton’s Tavern. The brooks that cross the road have all been shunted into underground culverts. Also note the presence of the little cross street across from “S. Parsons,” which was once called Parsons Lane but is now called Armandale Street. Also notice that the “lower road” only has one route as the more modern version of Main Street/Route 9 had yet to be built. Finally, numerous mills line nearby Kettle Brook, a topic which I will return to in the next entry.

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A Jones for Taverns

Jenkins also mentions that “at Cherry Valley was Jones’s Tavern, well-known in the coaching days and still remembered by the older inhabitants….which stood on the south side of the Great Post Road, while the inn was contained in another building on the opposite side of the road until 1865, during all of which time it was known as Jones’s Tavern.”³⁶ We have already seen that Stebbins placed the tavern of John Jones on the north side of the old road, Apricot Street, just after the split with Main Street. Although there is no Sanborn Insurance map from 1910 of the area around Apricot Street, there is a Sanborn map from 1937 that is informative. Map #227 of Volume 2 of the series of maps of Worcester produced by the Sanborn Map Company (see below, also available on the Library of Congress website) shows a very large property on the north side of Main Street that extends along Apricot Street to the junction with Wildwood Avenue. There is one large house on the property, facing Apricot Street about 100 feet past the junction with Main Street, with a large barn located behind the house. This is consistent with the historic location of the Jones property. Caleb Wall states that “at the old Jones’ tavern mansion, still standing, beyond New Worcester, on the corner of Leicester and Apricot streets, a hotel was kept by father, son and grandson, Noah, Phinehas and John Jones, successively, for seventy-five years from 1760 to about 1835.”³⁷ A “Jones” tavern is listed in Isiah Thomas’s 1785 Almanac, along the “Western Post Road to Hartford,” a distance of three miles from the previous tavern, listed as Campbell & Stower. John Stower, as I discussed in a previous entry, took over the tavern operated by Thomas and Mary Stearn, formerly known as the Kings Arms, in 1785. This tavern was located at the corner of Elm and Main Streets in the center of Worcester, which is 3.2 miles up the road from the location of the Jones mansion on Apricot Street. The next tavern on Isiah Thomas’s list is Swan’s tavern in Leicester, which he lists as three miles west of the Jones tavern. The building that housed Swan’s tavern still exists in Leicester as we shall see in the next entry, and is located at the northwest corner of Main Street and Paxton Street, a distance of 3.1 miles from the Jones tavern on Apricot Street.

Although the Jones name was no longer associated with the building by 1860 (Ball listed the building belonging to “E. Curtis” and Triscott lists it as belonging to “Captain Henderson”)³⁸ it appears the building survived to 1877 as Wall stated that it was “still standing” at the time. It is likely that the building survived at least until 1937, as it is still the only property located on the large estate shown on the north side of the road on the Sanborn map, at the corner of Main and Apricot Street, in an area where virtually every lot around it had been developed.

Wall refers to Noah Jones as the “first keeper of the old Jones tavern beyond New Worcester, from 1760 to 1781.”³⁹ Noah Jones married Rebecca Heywood, daughter of Daniel Heywood, who kept the earliest tavern operated in Worcester, a topic I covered in a previous entry (Worcester, part two). A prospective tavern-keeper marrying the daughter of another tavern-keeper was a sensible and not uncommon practice in the colonial era, as I have noted numerous times over the course of this project. Having grown up in a tavern, Rebecca was well-placed to operate a tavern with her new husband. The tavern is listed in Nathanael Low’s Almanac for 1787, located the same distance from the same taverns as Isiah Thomas described.⁴⁰ Noah Jones operated the tavern from 1760 to 1781, when he died. Wall lists Noah Jones as one of the graves in the cemetery that once covered most of Worcester Common, along with his wife Rebecca, who died in 1771 at the age of 46.⁴¹ Also buried alongside Noah Jones was his brother William Jones, who died in 1777. William Jones operated the tavern where the Hanover Theater is now located in downtown Worcester, and is the Jones mentioned in the narrative of the British spies Henry DeBerniere and William Brown, a topic I discussed in a previous entry.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map #227 from the collection of the Library of Congress. This section shows the north side of Main Street from Brookline Street to Apricot Street. Notice how almost every lot has been developed along Main Street, with the notable exception of the large lot on the north side where Apricot Street splits from Main Street. The building (with a barn located behind it) facing Apricot Street is likely the Jones tavern, first opened in 1760 along Apricot Street, discussed in this entry.

Phinehas Jones, the son of Noah and Rebecca, operated the tavern from about 1781 until his death in 1814, along with his wife Kathleen Gates, the daughter of Simon Gates, whose farm was at the end of Gates Lane, as discussed earlier.⁴² Charles Nutt, in his History of Worcester (1919) relates a story about a curious organization with which Phinehas Jones was associated, the Worcester Association of Mutual Aid in Detecting Thieves: “The constables of early days were not paid salaries, nor were they trained detectives. Horse stealing became a great annoyance to the farmers and many towns formed societies to suppress it. It was organized Nov. 16, 1795. After a regular police force was formed the activity of the society ceased, but for social purposes and on account of the early history, the members have maintained the organization to the present. The members admitted in 1795 were David Andrews, Samuel Andrews, John Barnard, Samuel Brazier, Samuel Brooks, John Chamberlain, Thaddeus Chapin, Oliver Fisher, Samuel Flagg, Daniel Goulding, John Green, Asa Hamilton, Abel Heywood, Benjamin Heywood, Daniel Heywood, Daniel Heywood 2d, Joel Howe, Phineas Jones, Ephraim Mower, Nathaniel Paine, John Pierce, Ebenezer Reed, Robert Smith, Charles Stearns, Isaiah Thomas, Walter Tufts, Asa Ward, Joshua Whitney, Daniel Willington, and Leonard Worcester.”⁴³ Among the original members were David Andrews and John Peirce (spelled this way on the map he signed), who produced the 1795 map of Worcester, Isiah Thomas, the famous printer who also published the almanac cited above, as well the tavern keepers Asa Hamilton, Daniel Heywood, Phinehas Jones, Ephraim Mower, and Charles Stearns, all of whom have been mentioned at some point in these entries about the route of the Upper Boston Post Road in Worcester.

John Jones, the final proprietor of the Jones Tavern, was born in 1786, and is the “J. Jones” shown on the 1833 map of Heman Stebbins. Wall says the tavern operated until 1835, by which time the Stafford Turnpike and the new railroads were siphoning off much of the reduced traffic that might still have passed the tavern now precariously located just off Main Street, the “new road to Albany and Springfield.” There is no tavern listed or any property owned by the Jones family along the road Phineas Ball called “Apricott Street” on his map of 1860. It appears that, even if the building had survived, the owners had long ceased operating a tavern. Jenkins, writing in 1913, claims the tavern was “still remembered by older inhabitants.” These would have been very old and well-traveled inhabitants indeed if they recalled the tavern from the “old-coaching days,” as it was a tavern located on the old road in the lightly-populated western outskirts of Worcester which closed in 1835, not 1865 as Jenkins wrote, ceasing operation 78 years before his book was published. As usual, with Stephen Jenkins and with Stewart Holbrook, author of a later book called The Old Post Road (1962), there might be a grain of truth in some of what he writes, but it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Today the large lot on the north side of Apricot Street at Main Street has been developed. One section is taken up by the large Parsons Hill Rehabilitation and Health Center at 1350 Main Street. Next door are two apartment buildings at #2 and #6 Apricot Street and behind all this is Crest Circle, a road entered from Wildwood Avenue and lined with houses built in the 1950s or 1960s. There is no evidence that a large farm and tavern once occupied this extensive property.

What is left of the Parsons Cider Mill along Apricot Street in Worcester. The building housing Hamilton’s Tavern (1794-1800) was purchased by Solomon Parsons in 1812, and for the next 126 years the Parsons family ran a farm and operated a cider mill on the property. Today a trail through the woods follows the creek through the property. The eastern section of the old farm is now crossed by Goddard Memorial Drive.

Beyond the Jones Tavern was Hamilton’s tavern which was prominently featured on the 1795 map of Peirce and Andrews. Why they did not feature the Jones Tavern on their map is a mystery, as both Asa Hamilton and Phinehas Jones were members with Peirce and Andrews in the Association of Mutual Aid in Detecting Horse Thieves. The Jones Tavern was clearly the longer-established and more well-known of the two and regularly appeared in tavern lists in almanacs of the time, but I cannot find mention of Hamilton’s Tavern in any of the almanacs of the period. Regardless, the Hamilton Tavern is the one that appears on the map, despite the fact that Asa Hamilton only kept it from 1794 to 1800, when he “removed in 1800 from the estate beyond New Worcester, (now owned and occupied by Solomon Parsons), where he had been keeping a hotel.”⁴⁴ Hamilton had moved to Worcester from Brookfield at an early age. His father Reuben Hamilton, was a longtime deacon of the church in Brookfield and will reappear in a later entry.

Solomon Parsons took over the tavern but appears to have lived in it as a farmhouse as there is no mention of a Parsons tavern in any of the records. It is also possible that the new road to Springfield had already been built and traffic passed instead along the lower road, making a tavern along the old road an unprofitable venture. Jones’ Tavern, located at the junction of Main Street and Apricot Street, perhaps could still count on some of the traffic passing along the nearby road as that tavern survived until 1835. The 1875 Worcester City Directory confirms that almost everyone of the people shown on Triscott’s 1878 map living along Apricot Street, including Rufus Rockwood, William Schofield, Frederick and Peter Reynolds, as well as Solomon Parsons, were farmers on this now quiet “old road.”

The Parsons name has long been associated with the area. The hill up which Apricot Street climbs is called Parsons Hill and, before 1880, Armandale Street was called Parsons Lane. Parsons appear in the Worcester City Directory for decades: Samuel B. Parsons is listed as a surveyor living on Apricot Street and Solomon Sr and Solomon Jr. are listed as farmers on Apricot Street. Triscott listed the house in 1878 as being occupied by “S. & S.B. Parsons,” so presumably the brothers lived together. Like Triscott and unlike Stebbins, who lists two houses on the road owned by “S. Parsons,” Ball listed only the one “S. Parsons” house, close to a brook that crosses Apricot Street and what is now Armandale Street as well as Main Street before merging with Kettle Brook.

Today the Parsons farm is gone, but the area has now become a park with a trail through the woods following along Parsons Brook and around Parsons Pond, created by Solomon Parsons to power the cider mill that was shown on the 1937 Sanborn Map (#226). A marker along Apricot Street at the entrance to the property explains that “from 1812 until 1938, four generations of the Parsons family owned the land referred to as Parsons Cider Mill….all of the farm buildings and the cider mill have been removed.” The area today is forested and the only trace of the existence of a farm or of the mill are the remnants of dams across the brook that now runs into a culvert before crossing Apricot street underground (see photo). It is a bucolic place along what has been a very busy and noisy walk along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road through Worcester.

Up, Up, and Away

Memorial to Robert Goddard, the “Father of the Space Age.” Goddard was born nearby, went to nearby South High, did his undergraduate work at WPI, and his graduate work at Clark, where he was also a professor. He launched the first liquid-fueled rocket in a field in nearby Auburn, Massachusetts, in 1926. He is buried in nearby Mount Hope Cemetery.

Shortly after the Parsons farm left the family a large road was pushed through the eastern half of the property. The Sanborn map for 1937 shows the planned road (marked as “Not Yet Open”) that would become Goddard Memorial Drive, the busy four-lane road that crosses Apricot Street between the old Jones Tavern property and the Parsons Cider Mill. On the west side of the busy road is a small park with a monument dedicated to Robert Goddard (see photo), the man for whom the road is named. This informative wayside describes the life and exploits of the man often called the “Father of the Space Age.”

Goddard was born nearby in 1882, in a house called Maple Hill, now located at 1 Tallawanda Drive near Gates Lane (MACRIS #WOR.1306; c. 1830-1840; originally 17 Gates Lane, now 1 Tallawanda Drive). The house was the home of Goddard’s great-grandmother, Elvira C. Goddard Thayer Ward, and is shown On Triscott’s map of 1878 as the property of “Mrs. William H. Ward.” Ball shows the house on his 1860 map as belonging to “W. Ward.” According to the historic structure report for the building, “the property had been in the Ward family from circa 1840, when it was purchased by William Ward at an auction. Earlier property owners were John and Simon Gates (ca. 1819-1840), and possibly William Paine (prior to 1819).” The area around Gates Lane was subsequently developed and the house now sits in the midst of a modern development.

Not only did Goddard’s family have deep roots in the area, Goddard himself is deeply connected to Worcester. After suffering from ill health throughout his childhood, Goddard graduated as valedictorian in 1904 from South High, when it was located on Richards Avenue (the building still exists as Goddard School of Science, an elementary school located across the street from the site of the S.S. Gates house at 5 Richards Avenue, discussed in the last entry), before it moved to its current home up Apricot Street a few hundred yards from the Goddard memorial. Goddard got his undergraduate degree from WPI (my alma mater!) and his Master’s degree and doctorate from Clark University. Goddard was a longtime professor of Physics at Clark. Goddard is buried in nearby Mount Hope Cemetery.

Goddard’s main claim to fame is his early and important research in rocketry, research that led to more than 200 patents that laid the foundation for all subsequent developments in space flight. He launched what is thought to be the first ever liquid-fueled rocket, in a family-owned field in nearby Auburn, Massachusetts in 1926. A story that was widely circulated, and very likely apocryphal, when I was a student at WPI in the 1980s was that Goddard, who spent the year after his graduation as an instructor at the school, had blown up a physics lab with one of his experiments and was asked to leave and that was the reason he ended up at Clark University. His experiments frequently resulted in explosions or fires, and eventually he was banned from firing rockets in Massachusetts, so he packed up his lab and moved it to the open spaces of New Mexico, settling in a small town called Roswell, where he continued his research (yes, that Roswell). Goddard died from cancer in 1945, just as the Space Age was about to begin and before the general public had begun to understand the importance of his research, but his accomplishments were widely appreciated by the scientists who continued his work and the first space flight research center was named for him when it opened in Greenbelt, Maryland in 1959. As Apollo 11 approached the moon in July, 1969, the New York Times ran a retraction of an editorial it had run in 1920, which had mocked Goddard’s research and had suggested he had not understood Newton’s Third Law of Motion, stating drily in their apology that “it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum. The Times regrets its error.”

After backtracking to visit the Goddard memorial at the corner of Apricot Street and Goddard Memorial Drive, I continue along Apricot Street past the site of Parsons farm and cider mill and begin a very steep climb up to the border with Leicester. The shape of the road today is remarkably similar to the road shown on Stebbins map, but in 1833 Parsons farm was the last house shown along the road. Today, for the most part, the area is a tranquil suburban neighborhood with a few older houses interspersed among mostly newer houses. Perhaps one of these older houses is one of the three houses shown along the road on Ball’s map of 1860, or one of the six houses shown on Triscott’s map of 1878. The Sanborn map of 1937 shows dozens of lots laid out along Apricot Street and at least twenty houses, a sign that development in Worcester had reached the borders of the city. The most significant feature of the last section of the walk, besides the change in elevation, is the presence on the north side of the street of two schools, the Sullivan Middle School, and South High Community School, the modern incarnation of the school from which Robert Goddard graduated in 1904. Suddenly, with little warning and no fanfare, after crossing the entrance road to the high school, the sidewalk stops and a sign indicates I have left Worcester and entered Leicester, where Apricot Street becomes Sargent Street and where this entry and my long trip through Worcester finally ends. There were no fireworks.

*End of the road in Worcester. View east along Apricot Street at the border with Leicester.*

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Au Revoir Worcester

Sign indicating the border between Worcester and Leicester, the next town west along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road. Apricot Street in Worcester becomes Sargent Street in Leicester. Incidentally, this sign is located at 787 feet above sea level, the highest elevation thus far along the route.

Caleb Wall recounts the arrival in Worcester of George Washington on his second visit in October, 1789: “Information being received in Worcester during Thursday evening, that Washington would be here the next morning, a company of respectable citizens, about forty in number, paraded before sunrise, on horse-back, and went out as far as Leicester line to welcome him into the town. The Worcester Company of Artillery commanded by Maj, Wm. Treadwell were already assembled, on notice being given that Washington was approaching, and before he reached here, five cannon were fired for the New England States: Three for the New England States in the Union, one for Vermont which will be speedily admitted, and one as a call to Rhode Island to be ready before it is too late. [Maine was a part of Massachusetts until 1820.] When the “President General” had arrived in sight of the meeting-house, [the Old South Church,] eleven more cannon were fired. Washington viewed with great interest and attention the Artillery Company as he passed, and expressed to the inhabitants his sense of the honor done him. He stopped at the “United States Arms,” [now Exchange Hotel,] where he took breakfast, and then proceeded on his journey. To gratify the inhabitants, he politely passed through town on horse-back. He was dressed in a brown suit, and pleasure glowed in every countenance as he came along. Eleven more cannon were fired as he departed. The party of forty citizens, before mentioned, escorted him a few miles from the village, when they took their leave.”⁴⁵

The first President of the United States, who kept a record in his diary of his inaugural tour of the three New England states already united (Rhode Island had yet to ratify the Constitution), was respectful but brief in his notes about his visit: “Commenced our course with the Sun, and passing through Leicester met some Gentlemen of the Town of Worcester on the line between it and the former to escort us. Arrived about 10 O clock at the House of [left blank] where we breakfasted—distant from Spencer 12 Miles.”⁴⁶ Washington exited Worcester after breakfast, continuing on his way to Boston, following the Post Road along Main Street and then along Lincoln Street before crossing the bridge across the narrows at the north end of Lake Quinsigamond into Shrewsbury.

There is no doubt that my walk through Worcester has been a slow walk which, according to the Norwegian writer Erling Kagge, is “the essence of walking.” The description I have presented in these five entries of the road through Worcester along which George Washington passed has been anything but brief. I have written close to 100,000 words (97,194 words, to be exact, but who is counting?) to decribe the route through Worcester that was summarized by Washington in 273 words. Of course he was only in Worcester for a few hours, whereas I have spent a significantly longer amount of time wandering along the same road.

As I write the final words of this essay on the final section of my walk along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road through Worcester, I contemplate the time it has taken to complete the 7.5-mile walk. Of course, the walk will never truly be “completed” but my time wandering the Post Road in Worcester is coming to an end with the publication of this essay. However, I cannot decide when this entry actually began. Did it start more than forty years ago, in August 1982, when I first arrived in Worcester as a seventeen-year-old student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute? Or did it begin on December 29, 2021, when I made my first visit to Worcester expressly to study the artifacts connected with the Upper Boston Post Road? Perhaps it was June 1, 2023, when I first crossed the border into Worcester from Shrewsbury on foot and began my series of walks along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road through the city? It certainly was no later than February 14, 2024, when I began work specifically on the first entry devoted to the route of the road in Worcester, an entry I published on March 15 of this year.

It is now October and I am close to writing my final words on the 7.5 miles of the Upper Boston Post Road that passes through the city of Worcester. I did not anticipate that this section of the road would take so long but as I walked through the second largest city in Massachusetts (and, arguably, in New England, see above) I realized that I would be doing the city a disservice if I devoted only a single entry to the walk, as I have done so far for almost every town along the route. Worcester is just too big, too important, and too complex to wander through in a few short weeks, or so I have convinced myself. So I slowed down to enjoy Worcester. Perhaps I am just a sucker for cities, perhaps it is the fact that I spent a significant amount of time there in my younger days, or maybe I just like this particular place. For whatever reason, a joke I made in an earlier entry about changing the name of this project to Worcester Rambles has veered dangerously close to reality. It is definitely time to get going.

*****

*Robert Goddard House at 1 Tallawanda Drive (formerly 17 Gates Lane). The house is now the Dr. Robert and Esther Goddard Center for Innovation. For more information see The Wonder Mission.*

One day I was in a local bakery where I saw a person wearing a shirt that read “Worcester: Paris of the Eighties.” I was immediately intrigued. I knew the town was nicknamed “Wormtown,” but I had never heard it referred to as “Paris of the Eighties.” Did it refer to the bubbling underground cultural scene during the time I was a student living in the city? Was it an ironic statement about Worcester’s relative anonymity even within the narrow cultural context of Massachusetts? Was it a sarcastic reference to the infamous Paris Cinema, an adult theater that once stood directly across from City Hall during the economically-depressed 1980s? Perhaps it is an homage to a cafe of the same name that existed next to the Palladium Theater beginning in 2013? Was it actually an official slogan of the City of Worcester for some period in the 1980s that has been co-opted by the cultural underground, as some suggest? Opinions differ and there is an element of mystery about its origin. However, in a stroke of luck, I serendiptiously met the man who is credited with coining the phrase, literally as a result of slowing down along the road.

I wandered slightly off the Post Road, a five minute’s walk up Gates Lane, on a recent sunny day to take a photograph of the house in which Robert Goddard was born (see photo below). Upon arriving at the house I discovered that a celebration of some sort was underway and I was welcomed generously to the party. It turns out that the house had been purchased in 2021 by Charles and Marcia Slatkin with the intention of using it to promote the legacy of Robert Goddard. Charles Slatkin founded an organization called The Wonder Mission, an “organization dedicated to creating initiatives and experiences that inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, educators, innovators, and ‘visioneers.'” The centennial of Goddard’s first rocket launch is in two years time and this was the opening act of a planned celebration of the centennial with an eye to directing some of the attention specifically to Goddard’s roots in his hometown.

This particular day was literally “Anniversary Day” at the Goddard House, culminating in a ceremony in which a cherry tree was planted in the yard by the attendees. The reason for this specific action can be explained by one of the panels on the Goddard Memorial on Apricot Street:

“On a beautiful October afternoon in 1899, Robert, age 17, noticed a cherry tree that needed pruning. With a ladder, a saw and a hatchet, he climbed up into the tree and began to work. Recovering from a kidney infection, he soon became tired, leaned back in the tree and began daydreaming. Suddenly, he imagined a device that was spinning and rising up over the tree and high into the sky. The device was defying gravity…Goddard kept a diary throughout his life and recorded these words:
‘On that day I climbed a tall cherry tree at the back of the barn … and as I looked toward the fields at the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet…I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended. Existence at last seemed very purposive.’
Goddard referred to this life-changing event as his Anniversary Day and recorded those two words in his diary every year except 1938, when a hurricane destroyed the tree. Each October 19th he would stop and rededicate himself to his dream of inventing a vehicle capable of reaching the upper atmosphere and beyond.”

A new cherry tree was planted on October 19, 2024, Anniversary Day.

I was able to wander through the house which, as I discussed earlier, dates to sometime before 1840, and to chat with an interesting group of knowledgable locals, including Charles Slatkin, who was enthusiastic about promoting what he called a “Space Trail” to celebrate Goddard’s accomplishments and to promote interest in space exploration. I was preparing to continue my walk on the road to Leicester and went back into the house to thank Marcia Slatkin, the host of the event, when I overheard the words “Paris of the Eighties” in a conversation. After rudely jumping in to the conversation to ask whether any of the participants knew the source of the phrase, I was led back to Charles Slatkin who, as he and several people at the event acknowledged, apparently is the person to whom the phrase is attributed. This article in Worcester Magazine essentially tells the same story Slatkin told me at the Goddard House. In a follow up e-mail, Charles Slatkin sent me some more information about the house, about the mission, and about the origin of the phrase “Worcester: Paris of the Eighties” including the image below. My decision to deviate slightly from the road (300 yards up either Brookline Street or Gates Lane) was rewarded not only with the opportunity to meet some knowledgable and engaging locals, but also to visit and learn more about the Goddard House, to be able to participate in an important event unique to Worcester, as well as to discover the origin of the great phrase “Worcester: Paris of the Eighties,” and to meet the originator of the phrase himself. I only spoke with Charles Slatkin briefly, but I gleaned immediately from his words, deeds, and actions, that he is a fellow traveler, the type of person I most enjoy running into as I wander through the landscape west of Boston along the Post Road. I wish him well on his his journey as I continue on my own journey.

“Worcester: Paris of the Eighties” is an amusing slogan that provokes varied responses, much like Wormtown does. For me, it evokes nostalgia for a time that I remember fondly, particularly as the memories become more gauzy and the grime and sadness of the city in that era take on a heroic quality, a nobler precursor to the post-modern blandness along the road that usually replaces what was once atmospheric, albeit grubby. I much prefer the old to the new, even if it is falling apart, as the modern is too often just plain vulgar. At the time, I am sure that occasionally I thought the city was a bit of dump, not the center of attention, that it had seen better days; but it is that exact quality that now seems also to have made it, for lack of a better word, “cool.”

Now that I walk through the city with older eyes, I also like to think that I better appreciate the subtler things that make the city so interesting, particularly the quite astonishing collection of interesting architecture produced during the golden age of Worcester. Although I did not appreciate it in the 1980s, when I think back on what was a grimy but interesting time, I realize now that the incredible backdrop along Main Street played a significant role in making Worcester “cool.” These great buildings were not slick but they had a grandeur which was accentuated by the sense of abandonment that characterized the city at the time. I really loved walking down Main Street in the 80s.

To be honest, I still feel the same way about Worcester. I enjoy wandering down Main Street in Worcester and I love the feel of the city, a place perhaps with a bit of chip on its shoulder, but a place where it feels as though people with ideas can go to try them out on a reasonable budget and find like-minded neighbors, without the prices and the pressures of places like Boston or New York. The Armsby Abbey, to give just one example, is a great place on Main Street that serves excellent food and drink, carefully sourced from local farmers and brewers, and it does so in a welcoming atmosphere free from the remotest air of smugness, such a refreshing change from the overbearing, often condescending tone that exudes from places, frequently of inferior quality, in the big city east of Worcester that I call home and which is part of the name of this project. I don’t want to say it loudly lest it actually become “hip,” which is the opposite of “cool” in my book. Fortunately no hip person (and few sane ones) will ever read this entry so I have little to fear.

As I prepare to leave Worcester and to move on to the next town along the road, I take a moment to reflect on Worcester and its impact on the history of the Upper Boston Post Road. I have enjoyed discovering that Worcester was a very important stopping point for travelers along the Upper Boston Post Road, that Worcester played an important role in the American Revolution, and that Worcester has been a formative place for people such as John Adams and Robert Goddard. However, Worcester is also a place that has deeply influenced the person I have become; first and foremost at WPI, in the biology labs in the Salisbury building, working and studying bioremediation with Ted Crusberg (where I first worked in a biology lab), limnology with Ron Cheetham (my academic advisor and a great guy), and recombinant DNA biotechnology with Joe Bagshaw (where I first began research in molecular biology), or doing lab work in organic chemistry with David Todd in the Goddard building, or learning about fin de siècle Vienna with Deborah Valenze, modern revolutions with Pat Dunn (whose unwavering support of my quixotic ambition to get a history degree on top of my biology degree at an engineering school will always be gratefully appreciated), or the history of science and the history of medieval weaponry with Malcolm Parkinson at WPI.

I did not confine my time as a student in Worcester to the campus of WPI. The Worcester Consortium allowed me to take advantages of opportunities unavailable to me on my own campus, studying European art, taking French, and learning about Italian cinema at Clark. I also spent many hours meandering the galleries of the Worcester Art Museum, and seeing memorable performances like U2 at the Centrum, the Violent Femmes at the Clark University pub, the Fixx at E.M. Loew’s (now the Palladium), and Handel’s Messiah at the amazing Mechanics Hall. I also was lucky enough to be able to participate in some truly Worcester specialties like slam dancing (what was later called moshing) at Ralph’s, eating pizza at the Boynton, and eating more than a few late-night or early-morning breakfasts at one of the iconic Worcester-made diner cars. In a completely fortuitous turn of events, my step-father opened a restaurant called Arturo’s with Arturo Cartagenova in 1982, and I worked there over the years to make some pocket money and to get some great free meals that were quite literally as good as home-cooking (since it was my dad that made the food)⁴⁷ That was all in the 1980s, when Worcester was Paris. It might as well have been to me.

Is it any wonder that I wanted to dwell in the place as long as possible, following my own footsteps as well as those of the many interesting people who have also wandered along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road in Worcester? As I leave Worcester for places I have never visited, places that have no hold on my memory, the words of Rick Blaine in Casablanca come to me in a slightly modified form: “I’ll always have Worcester.”

*****

Distance traveled in this entry along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road from Worcester City Hall to Chandler Street: 2.0 miles.

Total Distance traveled in Worcester along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road (five entries): 7.5 miles

Total Distance traveled along the original route of the road from the Old State House in Boston for this project: 51.0 miles.

Total Distance covered for all the walks described in Boston Rambles: 112.6 miles

Posted in Bridges, Demographics, History, Population, Roads, Upper Boston Post Road on 17 October 2024 and tagged Census data, Old Roads, Population, PostRoad, Worcester, Worcester County
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Worcester, Massachusetts, #5.

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Worcester, Massachusetts, #5.

The Road From Paris To New York

Upper Boston Post Road Entry #18 (UBPR #18)

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