Leicester, Massachusetts, #3.

Savoring the Fruits of Leicester

Part Three– From Factory to Farm.

Upper Boston Post Road #22 (UBPR #22)

The Castle, built in the 1960s with stones acquired from the old Worcester Public Library and other buildings. Located near Town Meadow Brook on a site that has been occupied continually since the early 1700s by a grist mill, a schoolhouse, a hand card manufacturing company, the power house for the Worcester and Suburban Streetcar Railway Company, and a dairy. This building served as the Castle Restaurant for decades and is currently a “tapas bar and restaurant” called Castle Cantina.

“Only the Roman roads still lead into the open. Only the most ancient traces lead anywhere.”

Homer, Wings of Desire (1987)

“Crusade (verb): to make an effort to achieve something that you believe in strongly”

Cambridge Dictionary

*****

Back To Denny’s

If the tranquil and enchanting atmosphere of Washburn Square calls to mind an abandoned movie set of the quintessential New England Town Common, the half mile leading west away from the Common along Main Street in Leicester feels much more like the busy Upper Boston Post Road I have become accustomed to walking. Not only does all the traffic from Route 9 continue along Main Street after bypassing the historic center of town, but many of the civic buildings of Leicester, like the Leicester Public Library, St Pius X Catholic Church, and the Post Office are found in this area, interspersed among the banks, funeral homes, donut shops, and the numerous elegant nineteenth-century residences that line both sides of Main Street. This is the contemporary center of Leicester, and the foundation was laid by many of the people who built the elegant houses facing the Common.

One of the elegant buildings I mentioned in the previous entry was the house at 1003 Main Street, on the south side of Washburn Square, built in 1791 for Colonel Thomas Denny, Jr. (1757-1814), who moved here with his family from their former home on Denny Hill overlooking the Blackstone River Valley. Thomas Denny was mentioned in both of the previous entries on Leicester, and he appears again in this entry, as will many other members of the Denny clan. About 40 years ago I took a long bus trip through Mexico on the very cheap. After suffering from significant intestinal turmoil for many days, I found myself in a Denny’s restaurant in Guadalajara eating plain toast and coffee. It was one of the most satisfying meals I have ever eaten. Although I haven’t actually been back to a Denny’s restaurant in the intervening four decades, I keep returning to the Denny family in Leicester (no relation the restaurant chain, which started as Danny’s but the name was changed to Denny’s for legal and commercial reasons in 1959) in each of these entries because they played a central role in the development of the town of Leicester.¹ Each of the previous two entries has mentioned a member of the Denny family, and this entry provides a satisfying consistency with the other entries on Leicester as the Denny family also figured prominently in the development of the road west from Washburn Square.

Image of a map produced by Joseph A. Denny in 1860 showing the distribution of lots to the early settlers of Leicester, Massachusetts. Click on the image to expand it in a separate window where the lots of Daniel Denny, among others, can be seen, as well as the route of the Upper Boston Post Road through the town. The arrow in the middle of the image hovers over the road as it crosses Town Meadow Brook, just north of Denny’s Lot #12 and south of the lot of Nathaniel Richardson, who opened the first tavern in Leicester on the property, as discussed in the previous entry. Denny Hill is located in the southeastern part of Leicester, near the border with Worcester.

Colonel Thomas Denny, Jr. was the grandson of Daniel Denny (1694-1760), one of the original settlers of Leicester and the common ancestor of the Denny family in Leicester. Daniel Denny, as I mentioned in the first entry, originally lived in a house at 414-416 Main Street, along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road in Cherry Valley. The route of the original road is described in the towns records of 1723 as running along the fence on “the south side of his (Daniel Denny’s) house.”² Denny shortly thereafter (in 1725) moved up the nearby hill, called Nurse’s Hill at the time but now known as Denny Hill. Joseph A. Denny (1804-1875), a great-grandson of Daniel Denny and one of a number of Dennys to appear in this entry, produced a map to accompany Emory Washburn’s Historical Sketches of the Town of Leicester During The First Century From Its Settlement (1860) which purports to show the lots distributed to the original settlers of “the eastern part of Leicester” (Spencer, the next town along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road, was the “western” part of Leicester until 1753). At least two lots were assigned to Daniel Denny on this map: the first, Lot 46, encompasses the entirety of what is now Denny Hill, while the second, Lot 12, took in all the property along the south side of the Post Road to Springfield, what is now Main Street, from the original site of the meeting house on the southwest corner of the Common west all the way to Mount Pleasant, about three quarters of a mile along the road.³ The development of Denny’s second lot (Lot 12) will obviously be a central topic of this entry.

It is the first lot (Lot 46) which is of immediate interest in this story, as the history of the Denny family began in the house which “stood upon the top of Denny Hill, then called Nurse’s, upon the east side of the road.”⁴ Daniel Denny’s arrival in America was likely spurred in part by Thomas Prince, minister of Old South Church in Boston and author of Vade Mecum for America: Or A Companion for Traders and Travellers (1732), which I have described elsewhere as my favorite artifact relating to the Post Road. Prince (1687-1758) had spent a few years traveling after graduating from Harvard in 1707, wandering through the West Indies and across the Atlantic Ocean as far as the Portuguese island of Madeira off the coast of Africa, before eventually settling in England (around 1711) in the village of Combs, in the county of Suffolk, about forty miles east of Cambridge. After several years preaching in the local church in Combs, Prince decided to return to Boston and sailed in 1717 from Hull in the company of several parishioners, including Samuel and Deborah Denny, brother and sister of Daniel Denny, who himself had left Combs for Boston in 1715. Thomas Prince married Deborah Denny in 1719 “at the house of Daniel Denny in Leicester,” according to a history of the Denny family written by C.C. Denny, another descendant of Daniel Denny.⁵

Thus, Thomas Prince, the man who, in 1732, wrote the first book about the Boston Post Road, was the brother-in-law of the founder of the Denny clan in the town of Leicester. Prince owned property north of Leicester in what is now the town of Princeton, which is named for Thomas Prince. It seems likely that, having traveled this road on numerous occasions (not least to get married in a house located directly on the Upper Boston Post Road in Leicester, a road which also, incidentally, passes directly by the church at which he preached in Boston), his description of the taverns along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road (at least to Leicester) were based upon personal experience. It also seems likely that Daniel Denny, the youngest son of Thomas Denny of Combs (and therefore last in line for the distribution of his father’s property after his death in 1717), arrived in Boston in 1715 either because the minister of his village church (a Massachusetts native) suggested it, or, at the very least, with references from Thomas Prince that helped him settle in Boston before making his way fifty-two miles west along the Upper Boston Post Road to Leicester.

Regardless of Daniel Denny’s motivation for leaving Combs and settling in Leicester, Massachusetts, he quickly became an important figure in the town, serving as town clerk from 1724-1726⁶ and representing the town in the General Court for the years 1745-1747.⁷ “Captain Denny” is mentioned in Ebenezer Parkman’s Diary entry for February 1, 1744, as a central figure in an ecclesiastical crisis between the minister of the town of Leicester at the time, David Goddard (minister from 1736-1754), and his parishioners: “Great Troubles also in Leicester. Reverend Mr. Goddard, in such Darkness about his own State that the last Sabbath, though Communion Day, he went not out to preach, but Captain Denny going to him he sent a Letter to the People.” Daniel Denny died in 1760 and left his hilltop farm to his eldest surviving son, Thomas Denny (1725-1774).

*****

Looking East From Denny Hill, 2025. The original Denny house, with an expansive view over Worcester, was located here from 1725 to 1816. Three generations of Denny’s lived here before Col. Thomas Denny, Jr. decamped to a new house on Leicester Common in 1791. A well-known painting, by Ralph Earl, depicts a version of this view from about 1800. The painting was commissioned by Thomas Denny for his new house and is currently located in the Worcester Art Museum. Timothy Dwight, President of Yale, traveled through Leicester and wrote dismissively of the view in his posthumously published “Travels in New England and New York (1821): “From several of these hills there is a very extensive, but not in my view a very pleasant, prospect. Beauty of prospect demands not only amplitude, but variety. A continued succession of hills and vallies, scarcely distinguishable from each other in appearance, though less wearisome than the uniformity of a spacious plain, is still remote from that exquisite scenery, which forms the fine landscape. The eye instinctively demands something more.”⁸ Everybody is entitled to their opinion.

*****

A View From One Hill To Another

This painting, located in the Swan Tavern, is reputed to be a portrait of Thomas Denny, Jr. (1757-1814), the wealthiest man in Leicester at the time of his death in 1814. His house is located nearby along Main Street facing Leicester Common.

Thomas Denny, Sr., also a prominent figure in Leicester, was a colonel in the local militia and deeply involved in the febrile political atmosphere of the 1770s. He represented the town on many occasions, including at the Worcester Convention in 1774 (discussed in a previous entry). Col. Denny also served as representative to the General Court from 1770 until 1774, when the legislature was dissolved by Governor Thomas Gage, but which reconvened as the first Provincial Congress. Thomas Denny attended the reconvened Congress in Concord but became ill and returned home, where he died at the age of forty-nine, on October 23, 1774; his place at the convention was taken by Joseph Henshaw.⁹ Thomas Denny, like his father, is also mentioned in Parkman’s Diary, as he was involved in the transaction which brought Parkman’s son Alexander to Leicester (where he lived in the house on the former property of Daniel Denny, now at 414-416 Main Street, a subject which was discussed in the first Leicester entry). After the conclusion of the transactions on February 14, 1770, “Mr. Denny asked me to dine with him and I went. Din’d agreeably.” Thus, Ebenezer Parkman was a guest at the house on Denny Hill, which was torn down in 1816.¹⁰

After Colonel Thomas Denny, Sr.’s untimely death four years after Parkman dined with him, his eldest son and namesake, Thomas Denny, Jr., became the owner of the estate on Denny Hill (more than four hundred acres in size) at the age of seventeen. Later referred to, like his father, as Colonel Thomas Denny, he earned his rank as a result of his leadership of a cavalry unit during Shays’s Rebellion in late 1786 and early 1787.¹¹ He subsequently became involved in the burgeoning industrial scene in Leicester. By the time of his death in 1814, he was the wealthiest individual in the town of Leicester.¹² His story is illustrative of the evolution of the town of Leicester from a primarily agricultural settlement to a prominent manufacturing center in the nineteenth century, an evolution reflected in the history of the Upper Boston Post Road.

*****

As I have discussed in previous entries, the use of water to perform work began almost as early as English settlers arrived in New England. Leicester was no different from other towns in most respects, but the town had the added advantage of a hilly topography, which fed water into not one, but three separate watersheds, another topic I have discussed in previous entries. Although Cherry Valley in the eastern part of Leicester is part of the Blackstone River watershed and the northwest corner of Leicester drains into the Quaboag River watershed, most of Leicester, including the entire route of the walk described in this entry, is part of the French River watershed, which drains south, eventually flowing into Long Island Sound via the Thames River at New London, Connecticut.

At first these water sources provided power to run mills used to grind corn or for early saw mills, as we saw in Cherry Valley. Later still the water was used to power machines, principally in the production of fabric for clothing, especially woolen fabric, of which there were close to two dozen related factories in the town in the 1880s.¹³ The genesis of this prodigious expansion occurred after the Revolution, when Moses Brown and other businessmen in Rhode Island attempted to establish a domestic cloth manufacturing industry, heretofore closely controlled by manufacturers in England, who were loath to reveal the workings of their machines. In order to accomplish their goal, Brown and others convinced an Englishman named Samuel Slater, a recent immigrant with many years experience in textile factories in England, to reproduce these machines in America, specifically at a mill on the Blackstone River at Pawtucket, Massachusetts.

Not least among Slater’s difficulties was the lack of the proper equipment to perform the tasks that were required to take raw cotton or wool and transform it into something workable like a thread. Carding, the process of brushing the raw material with a paddle or comb-like brush lined with metal teeth, which disentangles, cleans, and intermixes fibers to produce a continuous web or sliver suitable for subsequent processing, was a vital step in this process. These “cards” were made by hand in the earliest days, and carding was also done by hand.¹⁴ A number of people in Leicester were engaged in the production of handmade cards by the 1780s. Slater needed cards that would work on his machines at Pawtucket and engaged Leicester native Pliny Earle to produce these modified cards to his specifications. Pliny Earle’s cards were successful but the labor involved in their production was intensive, and he quickly proceeded to devise a machine for the production of the cards previously made by hand.¹⁵ Pliny Earle’s successful designs for “machine cards” helped catalyze the early textile industry in New England, and the town of Leicester became the principal center for the production of cards.¹⁶ As Amos Hill Coolidge puts it, in his Brief History of Leicester, “The history of card manufacture and the town of Leicester are to a large extent identical, and no apology is necessary for the prominence given to an industry which has contributed so largely to the welfare of the place. The periods of greatest prosperity in this business, were those of and following the wars of 1812 and 1861.”¹⁷

*****

Where it all started. An example from c.1850 of a “card,” in which small wire “teeth” are attached to a strip of leather, that is then used to process wool or cotton into usable thread. Leicester Public Library History Museum. Well worth a visit.

*****

Thomas Denny, Jr. joined in the “distinctive business of the town (which), for a long time, was the principal source of its prosperity and wealth.”¹⁸ Partnering with another member of the Earle family, Thomas Denny and William Earle “made hand-cards on Denny Hill. In 1802 he began the manufacture of cards, hand and machine, on the corner of Main and Market Streets, which he conducted on an extensive scale till his death, in 1814. He had in the same building the post-office and a store.”¹⁹ This is the location of the lovely house built for him in 1791 (see photo), which was also used for the manufacture of cards. Another member of the Earle family, Winthrop Earle, “occupied for this purpose the west end of Col. Denny’s dwelling-house in Leicester, Mass. He soon after built a factory apart from his residence, and became extensively engaged in his business.”²⁰ That the business likely began at the house prior to 1802 is evidenced by the building labeled as a “cotton and wool card manufacture” shown on Peter Silvester’s 1795 map of the town of Leicester (see below), located nearly opposite the meetinghouse, which once stood on the southwest corner of the Common. The Denny house is located on the south side of the Upper Boston Post Road, facing the Common.

*****

Colonel Thomas Denny, Jr. House, 1003 Main Street, Leicester. Built in 1791, Denny moved here from the former family home on Denny Hill, and he continued to produce cards in a building close to his new home, both for hand-carding and for machines used in manufacturing cotton and wool. Although it is difficult to believe, the tranquil area around today’s Leicester Common was once the site of numerous factories primarily involved in the manufacture of cards for the textile industry. See the map produced in 1831, shown below, for an illustration.

*****

The tranquil atmosphere found today in Washburn Square, which I alluded to at the beginning of this entry, turns out to be quite unlike the atmosphere of the formerly much busier area surrounding Leicester Common (the names Washburn Square and Leicester Common are essentially interchangeable, although the Common technically is the green space while Washburn Square includes the surrounding streets and buildings facing the Common). Numerous saw mills, a number of woolen factories, and nine “card factories” are shown on a map of the town of Leicester from 1831. Although the saw mills and the woolen factories are scattered throughout the town on various streams and rivers, seven of the card factories are within a half mile of the meetinghouse and five are within a stone’s throw of Leicester Common, a far cry from the somnolent contemporary scene. One lonely building in the northern part of town is likely the descendant of the original Pliny Earle card factory, while the other forlorn outpost is likely the card factory on Denny Hill started by Thomas Denny. Denny himself left his home on the hill for a new house on the Common, although he commissioned a painting of the view by Ralph Earl, another member of the ubiquitous Earle family, which hung in his new home as a reminder of his roots.²¹ Leicester Common had now become the commercial center of what had once been a primarily agricultural community. The meetinghouse, once the ecclesiastical center of the town, is surrounded in the 1831 map by a bank and numerous card factories, an indication of the changing priorities of the townspeople.

*****

Detail of a map of Leicester center from 1831 by an unknown author. The map shows seven of the nine places labelled “card factory” on the map (the other two are the original Denny Hill factory of Thomas Denny and the original factory of Pliny Earle in the northeast of the town). Notice how the factories cluster near Leicester Common west along Main Street ending with the two at left near Town Meadow Brook, about half a mile from the meetinghouse. This section of the Upper Boston Post Road became the center of town and continues to be the center today.

*****

Playing the Right Card

The Swan Tavern, once the principal commercial enterprise along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road in Leicester, provides another illustration of the development and evolution of Leicester Center. The building, as I mentioned in the previous entry, is comprised of elements of the structure put up to replace the original tavern established by Nathaniel Richardson around 1721, a building destroyed by fire in 1767. The rebuilt tavern was run by Edward Bond for a few more years before he relinquished operations to Elijah Lathrop. The tavern was subsequently operated by, among others, Peter Taft and Reuben Swan, from whom the current building takes its name. To part of the rebuilt tavern was added a new house in 1842 by the then-owner of the building, Hiram Knight (1794-1875). Knight was of those characters you find in nineteenth-century novels, the self-made man who worked his way up from a humble beginning “without pecuniary advantages.”²² Knight moved to Leicester for work from nearby Oakham around the age of twenty. He was steward of Leicester Academy from 1819 to 1823, when Knight purchased the Swan Tavern, where “for about two years he resided, engaged during the time in the occupations of butchering, tavern-keeping and for a time was associated with Reuben Meriam in card-making and a store.”²³

The card-manufacturing business became the main enterprise of Knight after this period. Most of the card factories were started or operated by people who had worked in one factory already or who were connected to one of the factories through a family member or a spouse. In a convoluted connection which I will greatly simplify here, Knight ended up as a partner in a company descended from Thomas Denny’s original card factory, which eventually operated in a large card factory building that once existed in the space behind the Congregational Church, in the area that is now the parking lot next to Town Hall, shown as “Woodcock & Knight Co. Machine Card Fac.” on Plate 63 of the Atlas of Worcester County produced in 1870 by F.W. Beers (see map below).²⁴ Although the original cards were made by hand, the factories slowly mechanized the process. Amos Coolidge, writing in 1890, described the transformation: “At first the machines were moved by hand. Dog-power was then introduced, then horse-power. Thirty years ago White & Denny’s factory was the only establishment in which steam-power was employed. It is now used in all.”²⁵

*****

*Detail of Plate 63 of the* Atlas of Worcester County of F.W. Beers from 1870 showing Leicester Center. Notice that, although the map shows Main Street from Henshaw Street in the east to Town Meadow Brook on the west, most of the buildings are located to the west of Leicester Common, which had became the commercial center of town by the time this map was published. The clearest indicator of this transition is the location of the Leicester National Bank, which moved from its original home on Leicester Common to the building that still exists one quarter of a mile west of the Common, on the north side of Main Street, just east of the estate of “D. Bisco” on the map above (1084 Main Street today).

*****

Knight’s financial success allowed him to rebuild the old Swan Tavern in 1842, adding an elegant Greek Revival house to the preexisting ell at the back from the original building. This building, located on the southwest corner of Washburn Square on the corner of Main Street and Paxton Street, overlooks the contemporary center of Leicester, where Pleasant Street merges into both Main Street and South Main Street, the section of Route 9 built in 1931 to bypass Leicester Common, the historic center of Leicester. As I discussed in the previous entry, the Smiths, Woodcocks, Knights, and Dennys built or owned many of the elegant houses lining Leicester Common. They also were responsible for the development of the road leading west from Leicester Common into the modern center of town.

The business of any business, be it woolen fabric or cards or widgets, is making money. The various textile-related manufacturing establishments in Leicester generated enough revenue that the town petitioned the Legislature to charter a bank in 1826. The first bank was established in a new building where the current Town Hall is located, which opened in 1827, with a public hall on the second floor. This building is visible on the 1831 map above, between the “Meetinghouse” and the “Academy.” By 1855 the bank had moved to a building along Main Street on the south side of Leicester Common, visible on the 1855 map of the area produced by E.M. Woodford. On the Beers map of Leicester Center from 1870 shown above, the bank has moved west along Main Street, to a location midway between Leicester Common and Town Meadow Brook. The first president of the Leicester National Bank was John Clapp and the first cashier was John Smith, with whom Knight had entered a partnership in 1825. Later presidents were Nathaniel Paine Denny and Joseph Addison Denny, both of whom will reappear in this story. Hiram Knight was a director of the bank from 1850 until his death in 1875.

*Leicester National Bank Building (1871), 1084 Main Street, Leicester.*

The formation and leadership structure of the bank, as well as its slow migration west from Leicester Common reflects the powerful influence of the proprietors of the numerous card factories in Leicester. The vast production of cards for textile factories in Pawtucket, Worcester, Lowell, and other textile-producing towns inevitably led to the rise of local manufacturers of textiles, principally woolen fabrics, utilizing first the numerous streams of Leicester to power the machinery but eventually switching to steam-powered factories as technology improved. I discussed some of these factories, which by the late-nineteenth century were the principal source of revenue and employment in the town of Leicester, in the entry on Cherry Valley. According to historian of Leicester and former Massachusetts Governor Emory Washburn: “In 1837 the woollen mills of the town employed three hundred and forty-four hands and a capital of $180,000, producing cloths valued at $319,450; there were seventeen manufactories of cards, employing a capital of $74,000, and producing $152,000 worth of cards annually; and the aggregate of the products of the several manufactures carried on in the town was $531,439 during that year.”²⁶ The first point to make about this valuation is that the woolen mills and the card “manufactories” comprise ninety percent of the value of all the goods produced in the town of Leicester as early as 1837. The second point is that the woolen mills alone employed 344 workers, one in five people in a town which had 1,782 residents in the 1830 Census. The number employed in manufacturing cards is not given but must have also comprised a sizable proportion of the population.

In other words, despite my initial expectation that the walk from Worcester to Springfield would be an exercise in describing the Upper Boston Post Road as it passed through an essentially rural landscape, Leicester, the first town west of Worcester along the road, was principally a manufacturing town as early as the 1830s. The evidence from the population changes in the United States Decennial Census indicates that this transformation from an agricultural community to a manufacturing town was fairly rapid: In 1776, the town reported 1,078 residents and little had changed in the first census of 1790, when the town had 1,076 residents. As Washburn states : “the successive censuses of 1800, when there were 1,103; 1810, when 1,181; and 1820, when 1,252,—indicated but a slow growth. The whole increase from 1776 to 1820 was only 174 in forty-four years, or a trifle over sixteen per cent.”²⁷ However, the town recorded five hundred new residents by 1830, and by 1855 the population had more than doubled, to 2,589 residents. In 1820 the town was the thirtieth-largest in Worcester County but had moved up to the fifteenth-largest town by 1855.²⁸ This coincided with the rapid rise of the aforementioned factories and also explains the development of the road from Leicester Common to Town Meadow Brook, which underwent a substantial transformation in the same decades.

In his 1860 history of the town, Washburn, in the course of describing the burning of the tavern of Edward Bond (where the Swan Tavern/Knight House is located today) in 1767, gives a summary of the scene west along the Upper Boston Post Road at that time, from Town Meadow Brook east to Leicester Common: “In this connection, I shall venture to give, from the narrative of one who was familiar with the condition of the town at the time of this house being destroyed, a description of what formed the only village then existing in the town. Beginning at the west, near the Town-meadow Brook, on the south side of the road, stood a one-story house, which has been standing within the recollection of some persons now living, and was then occupied by Judge Steele. Next east of that, and on the north side of the road, was the house of Seth Washburn, where Mr. Joseph Denny more recently lived, about half-way from Judge Steele’s to the Bond Tavern. It was one story in height, and consisted of three rooms,—a front room, bed-room, and kitchen. Opposite this, the woods came up to the road, without any fence along its side and the children of the family made their play-ground among the trees that stood there. The next house east of that was the Bond Tavern. Next was the Meetinghouse…”²⁹ Thus there were only three houses along the half-mile length of Main Street from the Swan Tavern to Town Meadow Brook, where the Castle Cantina (see the photograph at beginning of the entry) overlooks Sargent Pond, created by damming the brook sometime after 1795 but before 1831, judging from the maps of the time. In stark contrast is the map above of 1870, where no fewer than forty buildings line the road on both sides of the street from Pleasant Street to Town Meadow Brook. Similarly, the map below from 1898, showing Main Street (the Upper Boston Post Road) passing through the town center from Leicester Common (Washburn Square) to Rawson Street, just west of Town Meadow Brook, is dense with the buildings that rose from the profits first generated by the making of hand cards.

The first section of the walk described in this entry follows Washburn’s description in reverse, beginning at the western edge of Leicester Common (just west of the Bond/Swan Tavern) and continuing west for half a mile along this section of Main Street, passing through the once sparsely-developed area transformed by the wealth from card factories and the textile mills, to the edge of the center of town around Town Meadow Brook. The walk then leaves the center of town and follows the Upper Boston Post Road uphill to reach Mount Pleasant, where the landscape levels out and the road passes through what was mostly farmland until very recently, continuing west for a total of 2.3 miles, from Town Meadow Brook to the border with the neighboring town of Spencer. The 1831 map of Leicester shows the distance along the road from the meeting house to the Spencer line as 915 rods; at 16.5 feet per rod, a distance of 2.86 miles. This walk starts a few yards west of the Swan Tavern, at the junction of Pleasant Street, Main Street, and South Main Street. This is about 500 feet (or about 30 rods) west of the meeting house, so the walk should have a total length of about 2.77 miles, based on the 1831 calculations. Google maps calculates the route today as a distance of 2.8 miles. The built-up area immediately west of the town center contrasts with the much more open area of “west” Leicester, reflecting the dual nature of the economic history of Leicester. A walk along the latter section of the road also provides many signs indicative of the current and likely future direction of economic development in Leicester.

*****

Detail of 1898 map of Leicester showing Main Street from Washburn Square west to Town Meadow Brook. This part of the Upper Boston Post Road developed into the center of town in the nineteenth century. Note the “Power House” and “Car House” of the Worcester & Suburban Street Railway, just west of the Cemetery next to Sargent’s Pond, the current site of the Castle.

*****

A Crusade Through The French River Valley Watershed

A suit of armor which once guarded the gift shop of the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester (which closed in 2013) now fronts a heraldry banner from the set of the musical Camelot which once hung in the coat room of the Castle Restaurant (which closed in 2021). Both are now located at the Leicester Public Library.

The reader would be forgiven for wondering how it has come to pass that, after more than seven thousand words in this entry, the author has yet to describe one step of his walk along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road in Leicester. The response of the author is that this first foray into the mysterious hinterlands west of Worcester has thrown up an interesting and unexpected difficulty. The initial expectation prior to commencing the walk along the section of the Upper Boston Post Road between Worcester and Springfield was that, since these towns were lightly-populated and would hence have few historical artifacts widely spread along a thinly-populated road, the walk would move a bit more rapidly than the slow progression through the history-rich towns near Boston. Leicester, the first town along the nearly fifty-mile walk from Worcester to Springfield, has already disrupted my hypothesis and forced me to make a choice about how I want to proceed along the rest of the route.

This project is about walking, primarily because I enjoy walking, but also because following the road more slowly (than in a car or on a bike) allows me to pay more attention to the road and to the artifacts along it. In my previous walk along the route of the Lower Boston Post Road, I would head out for days at a time, walking anywhere from thirty- to fifty-mile sections of the road, before returning home and writing a few entries summarizing the route most recently traveled. This had the advantage of allowing me to finish the walk faster and get from Boston to New York City in less than a year. On the other hand, the descriptions of the towns along the road in those entries were, of necessity, much more abbreviated, lacking much contextual analysis and serving mostly as locations where I discovered the artifacts and evidence that demonstrated that the road passed through the town.

This more recent project is, in my mind, a substantially different proposition. The route of the Upper Boston Post Road remains the single most important aspect of this project, but I have become much more interested in examining how the road itself is integrated into the history of whatever town it passes through. I have also become interested in the evolution of the road, in following what happened to the buildings, artifacts, and landscape along the road over time. This approach is markedly different from my original approach on the Lower Boston Post Road because it requires multiple walks along shorter stretches of the road, unlike my first trip which was based upon a single walk (although sections closer to home were walked multiple times).

The newer approach worked quite well for nearby towns because I could generally reach the towns fairly easily using public transportation, walk the sections of interest for the day, and then return home to write them up. I don’t have a car and dislike having to get one for any part of this project, although there have been exceptions to this rule along the way. See also the reference to Thoreau at the end of this detour from the main topic. However, unlike Watertown or Framingham, Sudbury or Worcester, the towns west of Worcester are a little more difficult to access. I always felt as I wrote the entries on the towns close to home, such as Waltham for example, that I could return easily any time and do a variation of my original walk or do other walks in the town to amplify my description in that particular entry. Thus, the entries from Boston to Worcester were quite a bit shorter than the more recent entries. As I head west, it becomes progressively more difficult to do multiple trips along the road in this manner. I had reasoned that I would not have to worry about that problem as the towns would be “easier” to write about, but Leicester has proven that this is not the case, nor will it work in towns west of Leicester like Spencer, the Brookfields, and the remaining towns along the road in Worcester and Hampden counties, based on my initial walks through these towns. I also know that, when I have finished researching and writing these entries about towns which I had heretofore never visited, I will be unlikely to return to research and write more; in other words, once I have finished writing about Leicester and moved on to Spencer, it is unlikely that I will return to Leicester. It is not that the town is uninteresting, but rather that there are many other towns along the road I need to visit, it is difficult to reach Leicester, Spencer, and the other towns along this section of the road easily, and I have a strong desire to move along and complete this project sometime in the next year or two, before moving on to other projects that have lain dormant while I research the history of the Upper Boston Post Road in Leicester.

*****

Detail from the 1795 map of Leicester surveyed by Peter Silvester. This section of the map shows the route of the Upper Boston Post Road through Leicester (the red line from right to left), from the border with Worcester in the east to the border with Spencer in the west. The center of town is represented by the images of the “congregational meeting house” and the “Academy,” and is indicated as “54 miles from Boston” and “7 miles from Worcester court house.” Town Meadow Brook (the black line from top to bottom left of the town center) crosses the Upper Boston Post Road just west of the “county road,” today’s Pine Street, and just east of the “town road,” today’s Rawson Street. Notice that after Rawson Street, there are no other roads branching off the “Post Road” and that the only feature recorded along the western two miles of the road is “Mount Pleasant” just west of Rawson Street.

*****

Thus, I find myself in the position of taking longer to write the entries further from home precisely because they are more difficult of access. To use the current town as an example, Leicester is reasonably close to home, but a day trip from my house requires me to leave by 6:30 a.m. to catch the 6:58 express train from Back Bay to Worcester, then to catch the number 33 bus from Worcester Union Station Hub to Leicester or Spencer (or East Brookfield, as the bus goes to the court house just over the Spencer/East Brookfield border). If everything goes smoothly, I can reach my destination anywhere from 8:39 a.m.(Leicester center) to 9:00 a.m. (Western Worcester District Courthouse in East Brookfield). The return trip is a little longer as the schedules do not quite match up, but either way it takes two hours or more to reach the road in the towns immediately west of Worcester. A car trip is not much better, at least an hour and change each way, assuming the unlikely scenario in which there is no traffic. The difficulty increases as I move through the towns to the west of Leicester. The opportunity I have to do the work I need to do to write about the route of the Upper Boston Post Road in Worcester and Hampden Counties is now. I might as well do what it takes to do the most comprehensive job I can before I move on to the next town, the next county, the next project so that I do not have regrets, as I do about long stretches of the former walk along the Lower Boston Post Road. Thus I have made twelve separate visits to Leicester beginning with the first one on March 5, 2024, and I will likely make at least one more before I publish this entry.

In the process I occasionally take the opportunity to visit other parts of each town and to treat each town as if it were a vacation destination, as it were. It turns out that every town has a few places of interest, not just along the Post Road, which are often both surprising and entertaining. It is not exactly like going to Rome or to Delhi, Bali or London (all places I have visited) but the towns along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road have a great deal to offer and my “trips” are surprisingly gratifying. If it feels as though these entries are moving very slowly and that I appear to be sauntering along as if on vacation, it is because, in many ways, that is exactly what I am doing. I want to move along the road but I am doing it at the pace that works best for this phase of the project. In the very first essay I wrote for this walking project, nearly sixteen years ago (March 1, 2010), I included one of my favorite quotes from Henry David Thoreau, the patron saint of walkers: “For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the infidels.”³⁰ It takes the time that it takes, it takes the amount of research that it takes, and it takes as many words as it takes to get it right, particularly if one is on a crusade. As it happens, there is a castle along this first section of the walk west from Leicester Common to the border with Spencer along the Upper Boston Post Road. So, clad in my modern armor (in truth, scarf, gloves, hat, and coat to ward off the bitter winter wind) off I go on my crusade, storming the castles along the route of my pilgrimage, reconquering the Upper Boston Post Road from the infidels in their motor vehicles.

The Walk, Part One: Knights, Earles, and Castles (0.5 miles; Mile 55)

The Washburn-Moore House (1789) anchors the southwest corner of Main Street, Pleasant Street, and South Main Street (Route 9), in the center of Leicester, Massachusetts. The house was moved across Pleasant Street when Route 9 was built through the center of town in 1931.

So, the strange man wandering along the Upper Boston Post Road in Leicester sets off west from Leicester Common on his quixotic quest for the holy grail. Although the contours of the road west to Town Meadow Brook have not much altered since the eighteenth century, the view of today’s traveler along the road is completely different from that of a traveler from two centuries ago. As Washburn’s description suggests, there were few buildings along this section of the road before the Revolution. The population of the town in 1776 was a little over a thousand residents spread over the 23.4 square miles of territory that make up the town (it was even larger at the time, before pieces were removed that now make up parts of the towns of Paxton and Auburn).³¹ An image of the road viewed from Leicester Academy on the Common, published in The Massachusetts Magazine in 1794 (see image below in the Mount Pleasant section), showed a bucolic road meandering through fields. Although somewhat fanciful, the image was probably not dramatically different from the actual road at the time.³² Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), whose Travels were published posthumously in 1821, wrote that the town of Leicester had “in the year 1800, one hundred and fifty-four dwelling-houses, and one thousand one hundred and three inhabitants.”³³ These 154 houses were widely spread throughout the town, although there was a concentration beginning to form around Leicester Common, as we have seen. Subsequently the natural progression of development was west, as the land is fairly level for the half mile along the road as it slowly descends to Town Meadow Brook, unlike the road east from the Common which drops steeply. Businesses and houses were built along Main Street west for half a mile and along Pleasant Street south from Main Street, and this became the focal point of town as it is today.

The construction of the Route 9 bypass in 1931 changed the layout of the Pleasant Street and Main Street intersection, which now had to accommodate a third road, and some buildings were moved to new locations. The buildings at 1065 and 1069 Main Street were both moved from their original locations on the east side of Pleasant Street. The Washburn-Moore House (1789; 1065 Main Street; LEI.75, see photo above) anchors the three-way intersection on the southwest corner, although in its much altered modern incarnation it is easy to overlook the fact that the building is more than two centuries old. The building next door, The T.S. Snow Store at 1069 Main Street (1840s-1850s; LEI.73), is not as old but can be seen on nineteenth-century maps of the center anchoring the southeast corner of Main Street and Pleasant Street. The next few properties heading west along the south side of Main Street shown on the 1870 map of the area (see above) comprise a “hand card factory” at what is now the Leicester Housing Authority, followed by a house owned by C.C. Denny, the author of the Genealogy of the Denny Family, the house in which Earl’s painting Looking East from Denny Hill once hung on the wall. This building (listed as the mid-19th century Richardson-Waite House, 1081 Main Street, LEI.69) still existed when the Leicester Town Center Historical Report (LEI.A) was first published in 1997, but was subsequently demolished to make way for the charming Dunkin Donuts building and surrounding parking lot that currently graces the location, a unique and much-needed addition to the neighborhood, as the nearest Dippin Donuts store (a local chain) is more than 400 yards (a whole one-minute drive!) away down Main Street.

*A reminder that Main Street in Leicester predates the nineteenth century. Knox Trail marker in front of Leicester Public Library.*

Across Main Street is a continuation of the dissonant mix of older nineteenth-century buildings alongside newer buildings in what could be politely called “modern vernacular” (and impolitely called supremely ugly pieces of garbage blighting the landscape). The J.A. Smith Building (1801; 1058 Main Street; LEI.76), discussed in the previous entry, was one of the early buildings to break out west from Leicester Common. Next west along the north side of Main Street is the truly ugly Crossroads Marketplace, which consists of a building clearly designed by a child with limited imagination who was given bricks in place of Lego blocks, a building surrounded by a parking lot that takes up at least two-thirds of the lot, as if a massive crowd of junk food enthusiasts and lottery addicts were about to descend at any moment on the store. Unfortunately this type of building is all too commonly seen on the Upper Boston Post Road. I get that people need pizza and scratch tickets, but does it have to be in such an ugly building? Who allowed this to get built? Did they have to knock down an architecturally interesting building, or could they have built it in an old industrial lot? Like the Dunkin Donuts, the fault lies not in the soulless march of late corporate capitalism, which is neutral and therefore as anodyne as possible (which is itself an aesthetic statement, but I digress), but rather in the local committee or individual who thought it was a good idea to permit these monstrosities to be built along what is a pleasing stretch, but what could have been an even more charming and cohesive section, of the Upper Boston Post Road. All for some more pizza, donuts, and scratch tickets. And people wonder whether America is in decline.

My rant concluded, I continue west along Main Street to reach the Leicester National Bank Building (1871; 1084 Main Street; LEI.68), the descendant of the original bank building that moved around Leicester Common, discussed above. The brick Victorian Gothic building was designed by noted architect and Leicester native Stephen Earle (1839-1913), the same man who designed the First Congregational Church in Leicester and many prominent civic, cultural, and ecclesiastical buildings in Worcester and beyond (discussed in the previous entry). Despite the presence of the functional but aesthetically discordant modern bank building next door, the old building still manages to exude understated grandeur from its slightly elevated position, a reminder of the period when some of the manufacturing wealth generated in Leicester was used to improve the town.

*Alonzo White House (1848), 1103 Main Street, Leicester.*

Back across Main Street, a few yards west of the bank, is the Alonzo White House (1848; 1103 Main Street; LEI.65), “the best preserved example of the Italianate Style in Leicester Center,” according to the description in the Leicester Center Historical Report. This house was built for Alonzo White (1808-1893), another member of the card-manufacturing aristocracy of the town of Leicester. White began work with Reuben Meriam, then worked for Joseph Sargent, first in Cherry Valley, then in a new brick factory built near Town Meadow Brook, where the Castle is currently located. Eventually White bought out Sargent and went into business with, among others, his near neighbor C.C. Denny. The exterior of the house is remarkably well-preserved, despite the fact that several businesses currently operate in the building. As the Leicester Center Historical Report states “The addition of a modern commercial structure at the rear is relatively inconspicuous and does not do significant harm to the integrity of this important building,” a lesson in how commerce and historic preservation can work, unlike the nearby failures described above.

In a book published in 1886 entitled The History of the American Card-clothing Industry, Henry G. Kittredge and Arthur C. Gould state, “It would be a difficult, if not impossible, task to give a record of all those who have engaged in the card-clothing industry in the town of Leicester.”³⁴ The byzantine combinations of partners involved in the card manufacturing business are too complicated to list in detail, but it is apparent that there was enough business to go around, as partners and firms continually were created or reorganized through most of the nineteenth century. On the 1870 map of the area there is another factory located between the house of C.C. Denny and Alonzo White, called “Bisco & Denny.” This factory was owned and operated by Joseph Addison Denny, whom we have already mentioned, and Dwight Bisco (1799-1882). The J.A. Denny house is located next to the factory on the 1870 map, which is today the location of a modern apartment building at 1083 Main Street called Denny Apartments. The Dwight Bisco house, shown on the 1870 map on the north side of Main Street, directly across the street from the factory and the J.A. Denny house, and next door to the Leicester National Bank, is a survivor from the era. Located at 1100 Main Street, the White-Bisco House (1847; LEI.66) continues to be a residence, although it appears to have been modified since the historical report was published in 1997. It is certainly the first property along the road from Leicester Common to have preserved at least some of the old trees along Main Street.

*Leicester Public Library (1896). Another building designed by Stephen Earle.*

The neighborhood becomes a little less disjointed and more residential after the Alonzo White House, with several Greek Revival-style houses originally built in the 1840s and 1850s lining the road, before I reach the distinctive and impressive Leicester Public Library (1896; 1136 Main Street; LEI.53), another building designed by Stephen Earle. Inside the library is an interesting local history museum on the second floor, well worth a visit. I have spent a few hours in the airy interior of this lovely Queen Anne-Style granite building, and can attest to the quality of the building’s construction both inside and out, as well as to the friendliness and helpfulness of the people who work there.

In front of the library is another in the long line of Knox Trail markers (see photo above) I have encountered as I make my west along the Upper Boston Post Road. The 250th anniversary of the transfer of artillery from Fort Ticonderoga in New York to the hills surrounding Boston is being celebrated as I write this entry. Various celebrations are planned along the route, with the celebration in Worcester on January 31, 2026, serving as the joint remembrance for the towns of Worcester, Leicester, Spencer, Northborough, and Shrewsbury. The culmination of the celebration of the entire journey will take place on March 17, 2026 at Thomas Park on Dorchester Heights in South Boston, 250 years to the day that the artillery dragged along the Upper Boston Post Road was placed on the heights above Boston Harbor, which initiated the evacuation of Boston by the British Army and effectively ended the military occupation of Massachusetts.

A few yards further west, along the south side of the street, is the modern St Pius X Catholic Church (1957; 1161 Main Street; LEI.50). Next door is the house of Joseph Murdock, an elegant Second Empire mansion (1870; 1163 Main Street; LEI.46) on a large corner property at the junction of Pine Street and Main Street. Joseph Murdock (1818-1893) was another card factory owner, along with his brother Joshua, and his house is easily distinguished on both the 1870 and the 1898 maps as it sits on one of the largest properties along the Upper Boston Post Road in Leicester. Directly across the street on the maps was the factory owned by Murdock and his brother Joshua, called “J.&J. Murdock Card Factory” on the 1870 map, and the “American Card Clothing Company” on the 1898 map. The company was originally established in 1840 by Joshua Murdock in partnership with Samuel Southgate, and initially operated out of the house at 1164 Main Street (1840; LEI.45) in its early days. Southgate retired, Joseph Murdock came into the business, and a larger factory was built on the property directly behind the house, visible on the maps above.³⁵ In 1890, many of the card manufacturing companies in New England merged to form the American Card Clothing Company, which explains why so many of the factories on the 1898 map, including the Murdock company, are referred to by that name.³⁶ There was a dramatic decline in business as the industry shifted to the South. The larger factory building was eventually demolished, but the original house on the property remains.

*Joseph Murdock House (1870), 1163 Main Street, Leicester.*

Also demolished in recent times was the house of Joshua Murdock, which was located between the Murdock factory property at 1164 Main Street and the Leicester Public Library. This house (1840s; 1150 Main Street; LEI.48, Carriage House LEI.47) is described in the 1997 Leicester Center Historical Report as “one of the grandest houses in town, with its large temple-like, two-story porch facing Main Street and with its octagonal Italianate style cupola rising above the east side at the rear. Just as prideful is the large carriage house behind it (MHC #47) with an Italianate cupola on top. Joshua Murdock built this house many years before his brother, Joseph, built a Second Empire style mansion across the street.” The house, the accompanying carriage house, and a third house (The Greek-Revival Samuel Hurd House, also from the 1840s, at 1144 Main Street; LEI.52) were torn down to make way for a large modern store with a vast parking lot in front selling windows and doors. No comment.

A few hundred yards down Pine Street, shown as a “County Road” on Peter Silvester’s 1795 map of the town, is Pine Grove Cemetery, established in 1842, where many of the families who once lived in the elegant houses along Main Street now rest in eternal peace.³⁷ Dennys and Whites, Biscos and Murdocks remain eternal neighbors in the bucolic garden cemetery as they once were for a shorter time on Main Street. An older generation of Dennys, Sargents, and Henshaws rest in the much older Rawson Brook Cemetery, opened in 1755 on the north side of Main Street. A more traditional New England burial ground, the much smaller site is crammed with the tombs of the families of the original settlers of the town.³⁸

Rawson Brook Cemetery recalls an earlier name for Town Meadow Brook, over which Main Street crosses less than two hundred yards west of the cemetery. It is named for Edward Rawson, Esq., who inhabited the “Rawson House, so-called, upon the Great Road, just east of Town-meadow Brook.”³⁹ This house, which stood on the south side of Main Street, is the same house that was referred to earlier as occupied by Judge Thomas Steele. When Steele lived there this house was one of the few residences along this section of the road at the time of the Revolution. Thomas Steele (1711-1776) arrived in Leicester around 1736 after the death of his father, from whom he inherited more than 500 acres, a substantial amount of property in the town.⁴⁰ Steele was a Harvard graduate (A.B. 1730, A.M. 1734) and was “long a leading and influential citizen of the town,” serving as selectman for twelve years between 1741 and 1768, town clerk for the years 1762-1769, and Representative to the General Court from 1752-1755.⁴¹ In 1756 he was “appointed Judge of the Court of Common Pleas for the County of Worcester and held that office until the Revolution.”⁴² Steele was, however, a Loyalist, and was one of the authors of a controversial “letter of congratulation which he, with other justices, had sent to Gov. Gage (General Thomas Gage) upon his assumption of command at Boston,” in 1774, a letter for which he and the other authors were forced to publicly apologize.⁴³

*****

*View east along Main Street in Leicester. At left is Rawson Brook Cemetery opened in 1755.*

*****

Although more recent local histories claim the Steele house still exists, Washburn (writing in 1860) states explicitly at least twice that the house “which had been standing in the recollection of some persons now living,” had been replaced by a house opposite the brick factory “built by Mr. John Hobbs, about 1818, upon the site of an ancient house formerly occupied by Judge Steele.”⁴⁴ Steele remained in Leicester despite his political views, likely because his daughters had married important figures in town associated with the Patriot cause, although he “remained a loyalist to the last” and died in the house of apoplexy, which today we refer to as a stroke, on July 18, 1776, only a few days after the Declaration of Independence was published.⁴⁵ His daughter Elizabeth married a physician, John Honeywood, in 1761, and they occupied the property briefly. Honeywood also died in 1776, at Fort Ticonderoga, and his wife died shortly thereafter. Another daughter, Margaret, also married a physician, Edward Rawson, who succeeded Dr Honeywood both as physician in Leicester and as occupant of the house. Dr. Rawson and his wife both died young as well (she in 1784 and he in 1786), and Rawson’s father, Edward Rawson, Esq., moved into the house, living there until his death in 1807, at the age of 86.⁴⁶

The south side of Main Street on nineteenth-century maps is primarily occupied by a large estate, listed as the residence of “E. Sargent” on the 1870 map, but as the property of “E.H. Stearns” on the 1898 map. Edward Sargent (1832-1883) was another of the numerous card manufacturers in Leicester. He and his brother Joseph Sargent operated out of a brick factory across the street from his estate from 1854 until 1868, when they shifted operations to Worcester. Sargent, along with other family members, expanded into other areas of manufacturing and had numerous factories in New England as well as a “mercantile establishment in New York City[,]…the two concerns, closely allied and trading under the name of Sargent & Company, being the largest of their kind in the world.”⁴⁷ The wealth of this enterprise enabled Sargent to acquire a large property: “In 1864 Mr. Sargent completed the building of his elegant residence, opposite the attractive sheet of water on what was originally the Town Meadow, ‘where the beavers built their houses and dams, and through which ran Rawson Brook,’ but which has long been called, after his name, Sargent’s Pond.”⁴⁸

Today the large estate on the south side of Main Street, like the Rawson House before it, is gone. The adjacent property to the east, at the southwest corner of Main Street and Pine Street once owned by the Murdock family, is now the home of the aforementioned Dippin Donuts, incongruously located immediately adjacent to an Arts and Crafts-style house (1183 Main Street; LEI.41) built for Harold Murdoch (who apparently altered the spelling of the family name) in the 1920s, all of which is surrounded by the ubiquitous parking lot. This lot is followed by two more houses that remain from the mid-nineteenth century before reaching the large lot formerly occupied by Edward Sargent. The view from the street today takes in the Leicester branch of the Post Office, a Subway sandwich franchise, a small stretch of woods that inevitably will be developed, and a small shopping plaza housing a veterinary clinic, a pizza parlor, and a Chinese take-out restaurant. Nothing out of the ordinary or worthy of note along the road unless you are aware of what used to exist in the same location.

The north side of Main Street has managed to preserve a little more of the view that might be encountered by a nineteenth-century traveler along the Upper Boston Post Road. Most of the property from Water Street west to Rawson Brook Cemetery was owned by another card manufacturer, Lory S. Watson and his son, Edwin L. Watson, whose houses and factory can be seen on the 1870 map above. Writing in 1890, Amos Hill Coolidge states that “L.S. Watson & Co. are the principal hand-card manufacturers in the country.”⁴⁹ Watson began making cards in 1842 and his company slowly grew, taking over other companies as they folded or reorganized, including the stock of Sargent & Company after the death of Edward Sargent in 1883. Watson was also the primary financial contributor to the construction of the current Leicester Public Library.⁵⁰

*****

*The L.S. Watson Card Factory Building (LEI.42; 1870 with early twentieth-century addition; Located behind 1182 Main Street, off Water Street. The last card factory in Leicester and the end of an era.*

*****

Coolidge, writing in 1890, summarized the evolution and the state of card manufacturing in Leicester: “The business now requires larger facilities and capital than were necessary at an earlier period. There has been a change in the number and magnitude of the manufacturing establishments. There are at present only five card-clothing factories in town. Formerly many men made hand-cards on a small scale. Now there is only one firm in town engaged in this branch of the business, and there are only three manufactories of cotton and woolen hand cards in the country.”⁵¹ L.S. Watson & Co. was that sole company. The original building is located just off the main road, behind the E.L. Watson House (1843, remodeled in the 1890s; 1182 Main Street; LEI.43), a house also draped with tattered Trump banners. The four-story structure looming behind the house was built in 1870 (LEI.42) and remodeled, with a brick addition, in the early twentieth century, and is the sole remaining card factory building in Leicester. This last survivor of the industry that contributed so much to the development of the town and entirely reshaped the landscape of the Upper Boston Post Road as it passes through the town, now sits empty with a foreboding red X attached to the exterior; I have learned from previous experience that it usually ends badly for the buildings similarly marked with the scarlet letter.

Stephen Jenkins, an earlier chronicler of the Boston Post Road, noted the absence of industry as early as 1913 in his book The Old Boston Post Road : “The principal industry of Leicester, besides farming, was the making of steel clothing for cotton and wool cards. An industry begun before 1800… [and] the main reliance of the town until the trust got possession of the factories, consolidation took place, and the Leicester factories were closed up…the absence of factories leaves Leicester one of those quiet, beautiful, residential places where ‘gentility’ is written large over every house and person you see.” ⁵²

*****

An image from a map of Leicester, surveyed by E.M. Woodford and published in 1855 by Richard Clark, showing the “Brick Factory” on the Upper Boston Post Road at Town Meadow Brook. Today the location is the home of Castle Cantina (see photo at beginning of this entry).

*****

Just west of Rawson Brook Cemetery is a large lot overlooking Sargent Pond, in the middle of which sits a large medieval castle (see the image at beginning of this entry)! According to local historians Dale Pitzen and Mary Kennedy in their book Where the Wild Strawberries Grow: A Pictorial History of Leicester, this fanciful building was erected after “Stanley and Helen Nicas purchased the Castle Dairy Bar from Neil Moreau in 1949. Using stone from the old Worcester Public Library and Worcester Y.M.C.A. Building (among other places) they built a miniature castle on the property, which had once been the site of the Joseph Parson Grist and Saw Mill, later the Brick factory run by the Sargent family.”⁵³ The Nicas family operated a restaurant in the building, which was filled with medieval armor and heavy furniture in keeping with the exterior architecture. The COVID pandemic killed the restaurant, much as it destroyed many other businesses, and the building was sold in 2021. The building recently reopened as a Mexican restaurant, although some of the decoration ended up being sold; a heraldry banner from the musical Camelot, which hangs behind a suit of armor in the Leicester Public Library (see photo above), is a reminder of the earlier history of the building. I recently enjoyed lunch in the restaurant and can attest that much of the heavy furniture and the “medieval” style remains (see photo).

*Dining Room of Castle Cantina, Leicester.*

The location upon which the Castle sits has served many different functions over the centuries, as indicated above. In addition to being the site of the first grist mill in town, first operated when a dam was built across Town Meadow Brook in 1722, a schoolhouse was later located here, followed by the brick factory, built in 1827 by James and John A. Smith, in which various members of the Sargent family and others ran their card manufacturing operations. The map from 1831 shows a “card factory” at the site, which is presumably the brick factory. A map of the area from 1855 shows a building labelled “Sargent & Brother Card Mafrs.” and is accompanied by an image of the building on the margin of the map (see above). The map from 1870 shows the building as “E. Sargent Hand Card Manufacturing.” On the 1898 map, however, the entire lot is occupied by the “Car House” and the “Power House” of the Worcester and Suburban Street Railway, whose lines ran mostly along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road from Worcester west all the way to the town of Warren. This project would have likely been easier to research without a car in 1898, when I could catch a trolley all the way to Warren, than it is today, when I can get a local bus only as far as East Brookfield, and an occasional bus only as far as West Brookfield. Warren is in the zone where there is no public transit at all, likely a factor in the slow and steady decline of the towns in that part of Massachusetts. Today the idea that public transit could link all the towns in Massachusetts is seen as an impossible pipe dream, and yet there was a time in the not too distant past when that was exactly what existed.

*****

The Walk, Part Two: Climbing Mount Pleasant (0.7 miles; Mile 55)

The Castle overlooks Sargent’s Pond, from which Town Meadow Brook flows south, crossing underneath the Upper Boston Post Road and eventually joining other brooks to become the French River in the south of town. Town Meadow Brook is one of the features common to all the maps of Leicester. It is visible on Silvester’s map of 1795, on the 1831 map, and it features prominently on the maps of 1855, 1870, and 1898. On the latter maps, the brook represents the western edge of the town center, with the detailed inset maps of the center ending at, or a few yards beyond, Town Meadow Brook. About a hundred yards west of Town Meadow (or Rawson) Brook is Rawson Street, an old road shown on Peter Silvester’s 1795 map as a “town road,” branching south from what Sylvester calls the “Post Road” or the “country road from Boston to Springfield” (see map above). Rawson Street (the “town road”) is the only road west of Town Meadow Brook branching off from the Post Road on Silvester’s map along the two miles to the border with Spencer. Rawson Street also appears on the 1831 map, where it is now one of three roads that branch off from the main road west of Town Meadow Brook, the other two being today’s Burncoat Street and Watson Street. As late as 1898 these same three roads remained the sole roads branching off from Main Street in “west” Leicester (see maps below).

*****

Detail of a map of Leicester produced by E.M. Woodford in 1855. This map shows the Upper Boston Post Road from Leicester Center at right west to the border with Spencer at left. The red area is the “First” or “Center” District described below, while the yellow area is the “Second” or “West” District. Note how many houses line the road in the center of town but how few houses, about twenty properties, line the road in the West District. The house of “O. Smith” is the Mount Pleasant Estate discussed below. Note that, unlike in the center of town, almost all of the properties along the road in the West District were primarily farms. *Also note the cross-hatching indicating a steep incline along the road just west of the border between the Center and the West District.*

*****

There are a handful of houses along Main Street after the junction with Rawson Street, before the road begins another steep uphill climb and the view opens up a bit. A few yards west of Rawson Street is the lowest elevation, at 893 feet above sea level, along this section of the Upper Boston Post Road from Leicester Common to the border with Spencer, a distance of 2.8 miles. By the time I reach the top of this incline, which is called Mount Pleasant on Silvester’s map of 1795, I will reach the highest point along the entire route of the Upper Boston Post Road in Massachusetts. The steepness of the climb up Mount Pleasant is indicated on even the oldest maps, with both the 1831 and the 1855 maps of Leicester indicating a hill with cross-hatching. Most of the remaining walk after climbing the hill in front of me is on relatively level ground, varying only a few feet in elevation around 1000 feet above sea level. This western part of town has, until very recently, been more rural, lightly populated and mostly dedicated to farming.

Washburn notes that, “in 1776, the town was divided into nine school districts; and the names of the several families constituting these, except the ninth, were recorded.”⁵⁴ Incidentally, these nine districts conform almost identically with the nine geographic districts shown on Woodford’s 1855 map of Leicester. Washburn, writing in 1860, describes the owners and locations of the properties in the Second District in 1776, which corresponds to the “West District” shown on the 1855 map. The West District, which stretches from a few yards west of Rawson Street all the way to the border with Spencer, comprises the entire remaining 2.3 miles of the route of the Upper Boston Post Road through Leicester. Washburn lists a total of only ten families living along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road in the Second, or West, District of Leicester in the year 1776. There were also a few families along Rawson Street, the other road in the district as discussed above. The description Washburn gives of the locations of the houses of these families is based in large part upon the owners and residents of families living along the road at the time he was writing (the book was published in 1860), which corresponds fairly consistently with the names of the families shown on the 1855 map. Interestingly, after almost a century, there were still only about twenty properties along the road in all of the West District on the 1855 map. Thus, cross-referencing these two sets of data, it is possible to piece together a decent description of the last two miles or so of the Upper Boston Post Road in Leicester as it might have looked in 1776 according to Washburn’s research, as well as how it likely looked around 1860. This analysis can be carried through the nineteenth century, as maps of 1870 and 1898 also show virtually every house along the road with the names of the owners also listed. Finally, as I walk along the road, I will also seek out what remains of the various houses described over the years, as well as providing a description of the road as it looks today, as I make my way out of the center of Leicester and head for the border with Spencer.

*****

*Image from* The Massachusetts Magazine, 1794, showing the view of the Upper Boston Post Road west from Leicester Academy on Leicester Common. If the view is authentic (where for example, is the Swan Tavern, or the house of Judge Thomas Steele, or the meeting house?) notice how few buildings line the road to Mount Pleasant (the hill west of Town Meadow Brook). The mansion in the lithograph is discussed below.

*****

Unlike Cherry Valley or Leicester Center, the route of the Upper Boston Post Road through the West District does not have many distinguishing features on the early maps of Leicester. As I mentioned above, the only feature noted on the 1795 map by Peter Silvester along what he labels the “Post Road” is a dot representing Mount Pleasant and the “town road” that is today’s Rawson Street branching south from the Post Road a few yards west of Town Meadow Brook. Similarly, the 1831 map shows only the three roads I mentioned earlier branching off from the “Boston & Albany Post Road” along with a drawing of the incline labelled “Mount Pleasant.” A couple of card factories are shown on Town Meadow Brook, as I discussed earlier, but there is otherwise nothing shown along the road at all for the last two miles of its passage through West Leicester.

Nor do any of the travel narratives or diaries of travelers through the area describe the western part of Leicester in any detail. There are a couple of references to taverns along the road in the late-eighteenth century and one remarkable image of a mansion along the road in an eighteenth-century magazine (see image above), but there is otherwise little in the way of first-hand information about the road west from Leicester Common. George Washington traveled along the Upper Boston Post Road from Spencer through Leicester to Worcester on Friday, October 23, 1789 during his inaugural visit to each of the states of the newly-formed United States of America, but wrote only that he “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.”⁵⁵

In place of primary sources from the eighteenth century the earliest information about the road comes from mid-nineteenth-century descriptions, such as Washburn’s account, and from the more detailed maps, such as the 1855 Woodford map, which is the first map with a detailed description of each property in Leicester. Woodford’s very detailed plan of the town center ends, on the western edge, at the Brick Factory, now the Castle, essentially at Town Meadow Brook. The larger map of the entire town is, however, still quite detailed, with the owner listed for each of the properties along the road.

Houses along the north side of Main Street across from Rawson Street. This area is the edge of the center of Leicester; there are about half a dozen houses along the road before the sidewalk ends. In the background the road can be seen beginning its climb up Mount Pleasant. The white house may be the house shown on the 1898 map as the later home of Nathan Lamb, discussed below.

There is a small cluster of houses on the Woodford map at the junction of Rawson Street and Main Street, and one house a little west of the junction as the road begins to climb uphill, owned by “H. Graff.” On the Beers map of 1870, there are a few more houses shown along the road in the valley west of Town Meadow Brook: one house on the southwest and one on the southeast corner of Rawson and Main Street, and six houses lining the north side of Main Street, starting with more property owned by Edward Sargent, who is listed in the 1870 Census as having real estate valued at $125,000 and personal property valued at $200,000, and ending again at the house of “H. Craft,” which was an attempt to “correct” the spelling of the same house labelled “H. Graff” on the 1855 map. In fact, the owner of the property was a German immigrant named Henry Graff, according to census records. Following the fate of the various properties along the Upper Boston Post Road in West Leicester through the census records, an interesting pattern reveals itself, in which the owners are initially (1790) almost entirely born in the United States, mostly in Leicester, and overwhelmingly in Massachusetts, but by the 1900 Census, many of the owners listed were born elsewhere, predominantly in Ireland and in Canada, but also in Germany, as Henry Graff was.

The detailed 1898 map of Leicester Center (shown in the previous section of this entry) continues a few yards west of Rawson Street, an indication that the town center had slightly expanded along the road through the valley, but there are still only the same two properties on the south side of Main Street and eight properties on the north side of Main Street from Town Meadow Brook to the point where the road bends sharply and proceeds uphill, with the “Graff” House owned in 1898 by “J. Gorman.” Contemporary Google maps show developed and more dense parts of towns with a white background. The map of Leicester shows the center of town in white, beginning with the property at 1350 Main Street on the western edge, a house that appears to date to the nineteenth century and that corresponds in location to the “Graff/Gorman” house, east through the town center to the May house at 950 Main Street, an indication that the area is considered “built-up.” West of 1350 Main Street on the Google Map of Leicester, Main Street passes through an area colored green, indicating the area is less “built-up.” In other words, I am leaving the center of town after I pass 1350 Main Street. Not coincidentally, the sidewalk ends at this point, and I walk along the edge of the road for the remaining two miles or so to the border with Spencer.

There are no houses on any of the older maps of Leicester west of the the “Graff/Gorman” house until the road nearly reaches the top of Mount Pleasant, just as there are no houses today along the road for the next three hundred yards as it curves sharply on its way uphill west of 1350 Main Street. On the south side of the road there is a drop down to a marshy area which begins just past the house at 1279 Main Street on the southwest corner of Rawson Street. There is a relatively new automotive repair and used car dealership carved out of the marsh along the road and a newish Tractor Supply company further up the hill also carved out of the mostly wooded land on the south side of the road. There is also a sign advertising land for sale between these two commercial establishments, the first of many alarming signs along what has clearly been a fairly undeveloped road for most of its existence.

The north side of Main Street has been relatively more fortunate than the south side, as it has long mostly been part of a golf course that has existed here for over a century. In 1894 the Leicester Golf Club was formed and rented land from Horace and Warren Smith.⁵⁶ The 1898 map shows the house and property of “H.A. & W. Smith” at the top of the curve (see map below), on the north side of Main Street. Today there is still a large house on the hill overlooking the road and the entrance to the golf course. The roads in this area have undergone some changes over the years; there was clearly a different entrance drive to the golf course in the early days, and there was once a longer entrance drive to the Smith property, which is shown as “O. Smith” on the 1870 map. The house is owned by “W. Lamb” on the 1855 map. The curve in the road as it heads uphill is a constant in all of the maps, although judging by the current structure of Route 9/Main Street, the road has clearly been widened at some point and the curve has very likely been smoothed out, as the older maps show a much sharper bend as the road heads uphill.

The golf course has gone by many names over the years, including the Mount Pleasant Country Club, Leicester Hills Golf Club, Strawberry Hill Country Club, and most recently, Leicester Country Club. However, the property was recently sold, and a sign at the entrance to the property advertises “60,000 square feet of retail development” and opportunities for “mixed use development.” The rumor is that a Market Basket grocery store will anchor a shopping center surrounded by a collection of townhouses. This is the second sign advertising the sale for development of open land along the road in the few hundred yards since I left the town center and will definitely not be the last one.

*****

View from Mount Pleasant looking east towards Leicester Center c.1839. This engraving comes from a fascinating book by John Warner Barber, an engraver and historian, who wrote books in which he visited every town in a state (starting with Connecticut and including Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and Ohio) and produced engravings of views of many of the towns to accompany his brief historical descriptions of each of the towns. His books, which I only recently discovered, are very similar in spirit and structure to this project. This view comes from his Historical Collections, Massachusetts, published in 1839. The description reads “The above shows the appearance of the village of Leicester, as seen from the residence of N. P. Denny, Esq., on Mount Pleasant, about 1 mile distant from the center of the place. The public buildings, the Orthodox and Unitarian churches, the academy, the bank, and town-house, all stand in a line on the summit of the hill, on the north side of a small public green, surrounded by railing.” Also visible in the foreground is the “Brick Factory,” where the Castle now stands.

*****

The entrance road to the soon-to-be-gone golf course is located just beyond the spot where the Upper Boston Post Road reaches one thousand feet in elevation for a second time. The road briefly reached the same one thousand-foot mark at the 54 mile stone on Leicester Common, before descending into the shallow valley around Town Meadow Brook. Incidentally this location is almost exactly a mile from the 54 mile stone, but there is no information about the existence of a 55 mile stone in the area. Don Lennerton, a Leicester native and local historian, speculates that it is buried somewhere on the nearby golf course and may turn up in the near future, when the course is developed (personal communication).

I stop and look east along the road from an elevation of one thousand feet above sea level and am rewarded with a lovely view of the entire town center, the steeples of the churches on the Common clearly visible on the hill across the valley, as are many of the buildings described in the entry thus far; the Castle and the redbrick Leicester Savings bank particularly stand out in this vista. I am not alone in my admiration of the view. John Warner Barber, an engraver and historian who wrote histories of each town in various states, including Massachusetts, included a version of this view from about 1839 in his description of the town of Leicester (see image above). I only recently discovered the work of John Warner Barber and this image in Albert Southwick’s local history, Leicester Recollections, and it gives me a frisson of excitement to think that I stopped to describe the same view that had been engraved and published in the 1830s.⁵⁷ Not only did Barber produce the same view that captivates me as I walk along the Upper Boston Post Road, slowly describing the road in each town through which it passes, he also visited and provided a description of every town in Massachusetts often with an accompanying engraved image taken from the sketches he made on his travels. It turns out that somebody else out there in the past had an aspiration and a vision to create a project not dissimilar to the endeavor I am currently undertaking. I am too much of a rationalist to believe in fate, but it is remarkable that his eyes and my eyes were drawn to the same viewpoint.

The view in the opposite direction (see image above) drawn in 1794, looking west toward Mount Pleasant from Leicester Common, was partially a bucolic fantasy, but it is not that far off from what the view towards Mount Pleasant looks like now. The charming view, despite Timothy Dwight’s cavil regarding the views in Leicester in the early nineteenth century (see the caption for the view from Denny Hill at the beginning of this entry), will be diminished greatly when a housing and retail development sits at the top of the hill where the gold course once stood. Such is “progress.”

The sole house on the north side of the hill at the moment (excepting the clubhouse), the “Smith” property at 1434 Main Street fronting the golf course, has, until very recently, been festooned with a gradually-decaying Trump flag prominently strung between two trees whenever I passed the property on the various walks I have taken along the road (it was no longer visible on my most recent visit in February 2026). This marks the third house in Leicester along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road where I have encountered such enthusiasm (with no matching energy for the Democratic candidate along the way in Leicester). I had encountered no previous examples of this flavor of political fervor along the road until I reached Leicester, the first town along the first fifty miles of the Upper Boston Post Road in which Donald Trump was victorious in the 2024 Presidential Election. Although the margin was relatively close in the town as a whole (52% R-44% D), precinct one, which encompasses most of the route of this walk, was slightly more favorable for Trump in the recent election (54% R–41% D). Not exactly a landslide, but a solid victory nonetheless.

*1434 Main Street, Leicester, Massachusetts. Trump flag before the decay started. Photograph taken on October 30, 2024.*

The evolution of the vote in precinct one of Leicester is illustrative of the changing fortunes of the parties in the last two decades outside of the major cities and surrounding suburbs. As I have described previously, the votes in suburban towns closest to Boston have become progressively more Democratic over the last twenty years. Here, in a suburban verging on rural precinct in Leicester, fifty-five miles from the State House in Boston, the opposite has happened. John Kerry, a Massachusetts native to be fair, narrowly won the precinct with 660 votes to 647 votes for George W. Bush in the 2004 election (49.8% D–48.9% R). Barack Obama also won the precinct in the 2008 election, with 708 votes to 694 for John McCain (48.9% D–47.9% R). However, Obama lost the precinct in 2012 to former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, with 721 votes to 746 votes for Romney (47.9% D–49.6% R). The Republicans continued their winning streak in 2016 when Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 775 votes to 619 votes (39.9% D–49.97% R). Note that Trump did not reach 50% of the total vote, as 10% of voters cast a ballot for third party candidates or left the ballot blank. The main problem for the Democrats in 2016 was the relative lack of enthusiasm for Clinton rather than a large surge in support for the Republican candidate. Support for the Democratic candidate rebounded in 2020, when Joe Biden received 767 votes but still lost to Trump, whose vote total in the precinct rose to 856 votes (45.5% D–50.8% R), breaking the 50% barrier. Enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate fell again in 2024, with Kamala Harris receiving 690 votes, while Trump’s total increased again, to 910 votes (41.7% D–55.0% R).

Whatever is happening more generally outside of urban areas in America is also happening in precinct one of Leicester. As we shall see, this phenomenon continues along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road west almost to Springfield, when the blue voters reassert their dominance. Although the section of the road between Worcester and Springfield is an anomaly in generally heavily-blue Massachusetts, it is nonetheless an intriguing discrepancy and is worthy of further investigation as I continue my walk west.

However, in order to finish the walk in Leicester, I must keep moving, so I put politics to one side and continue a few more yards up Mount Pleasant to reach the most intriguing house along this section of the Upper Boston Post Road, the house with a view back across the valley shown in the image above from a 1794 issue of The Massachusetts Magazine.

*****

The house at 2 Mount Pleasant Avenue in Leicester is likely the house built in 1772 by Joseph Henshaw, a house which has had many interesting owners over the years and is likely the house shown in the image above from 1794.

*****

When the image of the estate called Mount Pleasant, which has long since become the name of the elevated area a mile west of Leicester Common in which it is located, was published in The Massachusetts Magazine in 1794, the house was already twenty-years-old and had a complicated ownership history which was about to get even more complicated. According to Washburn’s description of the “Second District” in 1776, the first house along the road west from Town Meadow Brook was the property of “Joshua Henshaw and Col. Joseph Henshaw, Mount Pleasant House.”⁵⁸ It is described in the caption accompanying the 1794 article in a style not far off from a modern Town & Country article: “This elegant seat is fifty-five miles from Boston, on the post-road to New York. It commands an extensive prospect of the neighboring country; and, for salubrity of air, is perhaps unequalled: a situation equally favorable for philosophical retirement and manly improvement. The gentleman of agricultural taste on this farm of two hundred and twenty acres may amuse himself with various experiments in the most useful science of husbandry, and the sportsman from its forests and streams may find salutary exercise and varied pleasure.”

A fascinating paper on the history of Mount Pleasant was presented to the Daughters of the American Revolution (D.A.R.) in Leicester, on March 23, 1904, by Laura Hale (Stickney) Dingell, a paper “compiled by Mr. Henry C. Denny, copied by Stephen Tarlton, when the owner of Mount Pleasant, and loaned to be read at the meeting,” according to a preface added to the hand-written document, now located at the Leicester Public Library. The paper, which has some original contributions but which relies mainly on Washburn’s account, explains that the property, Lot #33 of the original division of Leicester (see the Joseph Denny map above), passed through the hands of a number of absentee landlords, including Jonathan Sargent, Jr., who sold the property for £200 in 1771, to a merchant named Joseph Henshaw (1727-1794), who decided to build a mansion on the 72 acres he had purchased.⁵⁹ Henshaw was not just a wealthy ship-owning merchant; he was also deeply involved in the political turmoil of the 1770s. A member of the local Committee of Correspondence and a participant in the Worcester Convention of 1774, upon the sudden death of Thomas Denny, Henshaw was elected to replace Denny as the representative from Leicester to the Provincial Congress in Concord in 1774.⁶⁰ He was also involved in the early military activity at the start of the Revolution: “At the commencement of hostilities, he held the office of lieutenant-colonel of the regiment commanded by Col. Artemas Ward, and marched with it at the Lexington alarm to Cambridge.”⁶¹

Henshaw began construction of the mansion in 1772 and moved to the new house in the fall of 1773, according to the paper presented at the D.A.R. meeting. However, as noted above, Henshaw was a very busy man at the time and was constantly involved in political and military activity elsewhere, so he spent relatively little time in Leicester. John Adams was one visitor, as he recorded in his diary that, on Tuesday morning, November 8, 1774, he “Breakfasted at Coll. Henshaws of Leicester” on his way back from Philadelphia to Boston. In 1778, Henshaw and his wife Sarah (the daughter of his uncle Joshua Henshaw, who briefly lived with them at Mount Pleasant) sold the house and the 136 acres he had accumulated in the intervening seven years, for £2500 to Lewis Allen of Shrewsbury, with whom he also exchanged properties! ⁶² A decent bit of speculation if the story is accurate.

Washburn states that Mount Pleasant was so-named by Allen, but Amos Coolidge, in his later History of Leicester, disputes this, claiming it was Henshaw who named the estate.⁶³ Allen died shortly after purchasing the house, and, according to Washburn, “when he died, was buried, by his direction, in the garden, as has been stated. The reason for this, as related in Ward’s History of Shrewsbury, and as given by Mr. Allen, was, that he might hear the news from Boston when the stage came along. A little grove of maples, growing close by the road near the avenue to the house, was planted by him. He died there in 1780.”⁶⁴ There is no evidence today of either the maple grove or of a grave; had there been one, I would have a lot of news from Boston to pass on to the late Mr. Allen..

The intriguing James Swan (1754-1830), portrait by Gilbert Stuart, 1795. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The property was sold again, with an additional seventy acres added to bring the total area to over two hundred acres, to Samuel Brooks for £926 (these are very confusing amounts of money; why so much less than in 1778?), who in turn sold it, in 1785, to a merchant from Newburyport, Thomas Stickney. Stickney carried on his business at the mansion until his death in 1791. In 1794, when the image in The Massachusetts Magazine was published, the caption read “The property of the late Mr. Thomas Stickney.” Mrs. Stickney remarried Captain James Lyon, who sold the property in September, 1795, “then containing two hundred acres, ‘with the mansion-house, barn, potash, farm-house, and all other buildings thereon,’ to James Swan, then called of Boston, for five thousand two hundred and sixty-seven dollars.”⁶⁵ The early exchange rate between the pound and the dollar (established as the official currency of the United States in 1792) was approximately 5:1, so the property sold for a little over £1,000. Again, these prices are very confusing as the price only marginally increased after ten years; the property market must have been quite unstable in the late nineteenth century. Incidentally, according to one inflation-calculating website, the value of £100 in 1795 is today a little over £15,000, so the roughly 200 acre-estate would have sold for about £150,000 or about $750,000 in today’s money. Not a bad price for 200 acres and a large mansion. The 223-acre golf course across the street was on the market for over $4.2 million, although that may not have been the final sale price.

Major James Swan (1754-1830), a Boston financier who participated in the Boston Tea Party and was wounded at Bunker Hill, also owned large estates in Boston, Roxbury, and Dorchester, and apparently left his wife in one of those properties upon moving to Leicester, according to the D.A.R. paper.⁶⁶ Swan was a true “character” to whom Washburn relishes devoting quite a few lines in his History of Leicester: “The extent of his estates, and the style of magnificence in which he lived, rendered the removal of Major Swan to Leicester a memorable event in its history. In all these, he so far exceeded any thing which had been before familiar to the people, that he was the object of general interest and attention and fabulous stories of the wealth he displayed were told for many years after his brief reign of magnificence and admiration had passed by.”⁶⁷ Not only did Swan spend a large amount of money on furnishings and improvements to the mansion, he apparently acquired large amounts of nearby land, up to 800 acres, land that extended as far along the Upper Boston Post Road as the Trask estate shown on Woodford’s map of 1855 above, almost a mile west of the mansion.

Apparently, all was not as it seemed with Major Swan, as Washburn wistfully relates: “He seems to have been a man who lived in a style beyond his actual wealth, or, by some revulsion of fortune, was induced to retire to France, where his creditors endeavored in vain to coerce the payment of their debts. I find the following notice in the Worcester Spy of the 18th September, 1830: ‘A letter from Dr. Niles, now at Paris, mentions, that, on July 22, St. Pelagie (the Debtor’s Prison in Paris) was opened, and that among the liberated was Mr. Swan, an American citizen (formerly of Leicester), who has occupied the same room thirty-two years [sic] and one day.’ The papers have since mentioned his death in Paris: he never having returned to America. His social position and family connections in this country were of the most respectable rank in life. But this work has properly little connection with his personal history, except so far as it was connected with that of the town.”⁶⁸ Apparently Swan had never actually paid for the estate, and the property eventually reverted to the heirs of Thomas Stickney. Like Washburn, I would love to regale the reader with a longer, more detailed description of the fascinating life of this slippery figure, but will refrain, not because of any moral qualms about discussing his personal history, but rather because I need to get moving along the road.

After Swan’s departure the mansion had a fitful existence, sometimes occupied, sometimes vacant over the next few years. One brief but interesting occupant, as relates to the Upper Boston Post Road, was George Bruce, who apparently operated a tavern here for a short time after Swan’s departure.⁶⁹ I mentioned Bruce in the previous entry as running a tavern on Leicester Common, but I find no mention of this location in the tavern guides around 1800, so his tenure here may have been quite limited. Curiously, the almanacs do, on a couple of occasions, list a tavern operated by Bruce one mile past Swan’s tavern (which is on Leicester Common), but this was in 1787 and 1788, when Mount Pleasant was owned by Stickney. It is possible Bruce operated a different tavern, perhaps the one nearby, operated previously by Abner Dunbar, which I will shortly discuss.

*****

Detail of an 1898 map showing the route of the Upper Boston Post Road through the “West” District of Leicester. The house of “H.A. and W. Smith” is the house with the Trump flag above; The Mount Pleasant House is the house of “S.E. & A.L. Tarlton” on the south side of the road; The “School” is just west of Burncoat Street; The “Mrs. M.A. Burt” house is the Benjamin Earle property; “Prospect Farm” is the result of the combination of the Lamb property and the Denny property, later Erastus White, and here Mrs. C.E. Prince, and later still the Soojian farm discussed below. The McFarland farm, the Edward Warren farm, the various Warren houses, and the D.E. Rice farm are the same as on the 1855 map; some of these buildings still exist as discussed below.

*****

The house was briefly owned by another member of the Denny clan, a lawyer named Nathaniel Paine Denny (1771-1856), grandson of Daniel Denny and a cousin of Thomas Denny, also the President of the Leicester Bank, mentioned earlier, who never lived in it, and soon re-sold it, in 1835, for $1800, to Oliver Smith. Curiously, Washburn also states elsewhere, describing alterations to the original route of the Upper Boston Post Road, that “another change was in its direction over Mount Pleasant. It passed directly up the hill, and along in front of the house formerly owned by Hon. N. P. Denny.”⁷⁰ This may refer to another house in which Denny lived, across the street on Mount Pleasant, for some of the time he was in Leicester (he moved to Norwich, Connecticut in 1845 and then to Barre, Massachusetts, in 1854, where he died two years later).⁷¹ The view of Leicester above, engraved around 1839 by John Warner Barber, states that it is the view “as seen from the residence of N. P. Denny, Esq., on Mount Pleasant, about 1 mile distant from the center of the place.”⁷² Whether the view is from the Mount Pleasant mansion or from another house on the north side of the road I cannot determine.

As to the possible changes in the road, I am unable to decipher what Washburn means by his remarks. The road was certainly altered on its way up Mount Pleasant at some point in the recent past, as I mentioned earlier. Apart from wandering through the yards of random houses along the road or clambering through the woods down the southern slope of the road, I have no recourse but to follow the road in front of me, which is close enough to the shape and location of the road on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century maps to satisfy even my dogged determination to locate the exact route of the original Upper Boston Post Road.

Oliver Smith occupied the Mount Pleasant house for 24 years, according to the D.A.R. Paper, which also states that “he did much toward restoring the place to its former productiveness and beauty.” Washburn clearly disagreed, writing that, after Swan, “It had gone sadly to decay, however, when taken possession of by its late thrifty proprietor, Mr. Oliver Smith.”⁷³ The property is shown on the 1855 Woodford Map as belonging to “O. Smith,” the same Smith family that owned the nearby house across the street in 1870. Studying census records reveals that Oliver Smith likely moved into the house of Waldo Lamb sometime after Lamb’s death in 1869, and then Smith passed the house and property, some of which became the golf course, on to his two sons, Horace and Warren, after his own death in 1872.

By 1870 the Mount Pleasant property is shown as belonging to “S. & A.C. Tarlton.” According to the D.A.R. paper, Smith sold the property “September 22, 1859, to Stephen and Albert C. Tarlton, for $4,000. They lived together until 1872 when they divided the farm, Steven Tarlton retaining the homestead and the land west of the lane, and Albert C., the son, taking all the land east, on which he built a two story cottage and barn in 1874. Stephen Tarlton lived in the homestead until his death in 1885.”⁷⁴ After the death of his widow Sarah Tarlton, in 1891, the house was occupied by her grandchildren, Annie L. and Stephen E. Tarlton, who lived in the house at the time the lecture was given in 1904, a lecture “Miss Tarlton” attended, according to the D.A.R. paper. The 1898 map of the area shows an eastern house, owned by A.C. Tarlton, and a western house, owned by “S.E. & A.L. Tarlton.” According to census records, brother and sister Stephen E. and Annie L. Tarlton continued to live in the house into the 1930s, he listed as a “dairy farmer” and she listed as “keeping house.” In the 1940 Census, Stephen Tarlton, now 77 years of age, was living as an “inmate” at an “institution” at 1199 Main Street, likely a retirement home in or near the Edward Sargent house down the hill.⁷⁵ Annie L. Tarlton, aged 80 at the time, is listed as a “lodger” in a house in Millbury. In the Death Index for Massachusetts for the years 1941-1945, Annie L. Tarleton (sic) is listed as dying in 1943 in Millbury, while Stephen Elmer Tarlton died in the town of Norfolk in 1942.

According to local historians Dale Pitzen and Mary Kennedy, writing in 1997, “A newspaper article, dated November 15, 1947, reported that the Mt. Pleasant mansion was to become ‘the new home of the New England Boys’ Town. John Rasmussen, the future school’s general manager, dreamed of creating a home for needy boys, and began a drive to raise $200,000.’ The school never materialized.
A recent fire caused extensive damage to the front of the house. The property is currently for sale.”⁷⁶ The house at 2 Mount Pleasant Avenue has indeed had some modern additions, including the door, likely from repair to the damage caused by the fire, but it does basically resemble the image from 1794.

A photograph of the mansion at 8 Blueberry Lane taken from the MACRIS report (LEI.258) which has reportedly been demolished (there was no such house at 8 Blueberry Lane when I visited). Is it possible that this is the actual Mount Pleasant house? Or, is this just the house above at 2 Mount Pleasant Avenue before the fire?

Curiously, there is an entry in the Massachusetts Cultural Resource Information System (MACRIS) for a house on Blueberry Lane, the next lane west from Mount Pleasant Avenue, a house which has since been demolished, according to a written note on the document. The undated document (LEI.258) shows a photograph of what it describes as an eighteenth-century Federal mansion at 8 Blueberry Lane, owned at the time by the Desjardins family. No more information is given, but the house looks remarkably like the image of the Mount Pleasant house. Coupled with the description of the division of the property by the Tarlton family, it does make me wonder whether the house at 2 Mount Pleasant Avenue is, in fact, the original mansion, or whether the description on the photograph has made a mistake with the address and that the photograph is of the same house as the one at 2 Mount Pleasant Avenue, perhaps before the fire damage. I was told by locals that the house at 2 Mount Pleasant Avenue is indeed the original house but nagging doubts persist. Regardless, the hill and the property have an interesting history worthy of the lengthy summary I have presented. If new information arises, I will append it to this entry as needed. However, it is time for me to move on.

*****

The Walk, Part Three: The Once and Future Leicester (0.9 miles; Mile 56)

Emory Washburn, in his discussion of Mount Pleasant, describes the extent of property acquired by the spendthrift Major Swan: “he must have owned some seven or eight hundred acres of land in a body embracing, besides the homestead, the farms known as the Calvin Hersey Estate; the John A. Denny Estate; the Moore Farm, afterwards of Col. Henry Sargent; the William Silvester Farm, and parts of several other farms.”⁷⁷ As I discussed above, this would encompass much of the property along the Upper Boston Post Road west of the Mount Pleasant mansion almost to the junction where the old road diverges north briefly away from Route 9, about a mile down the road. Thus, much of the property discussed in the remainder of this entry likely was part of Mount Pleasant for some portion of its history, and many of the properties along the road are described in older histories as being located on Mount Pleasant, even if there is no incline anywhere near the property, most of the land west of this point being fairly level right up to the border with Spencer.

On the 1898 map of the road, the Tarlton family property extended all the way to Burncoat Street, one of the few roads branching off from the Upper Boston Post Road in “West” Leicester. A few yards beyond Burncoat Street today is a Cumberland Farms gas station and store, unremarkable save for the fact that it is located at the highest point of the Upper Boston Post Road between Boston and the Connecticut River, 1060 feet above sea level. After the steep climb uphill from Town Meadow Brook, the road levels out west of Mount Pleasant Avenue, and so the actual high point is not particularly noticeable along this relatively flat stretch of road. The road remains level, dropping slightly now and then, but essentially remaining around 1000 feet above sea level for the remainder of the walk to the border with Spencer.

*****

Highest elevation along the Upper Boston Post Road from Boston to Springfield. Although the entire half-mile section of the Upper Boston Post Road, from just west of Mount Pleasant Avenue all the way to the Walmart entrance at Soojian Drive, is higher than 1050 feet above sea level, the spot marked on the map in front of the Cumberland Farms is technically the highest point along the entire road.

*****

The nine districts into which Leicester was divided in 1776 were created as school districts. The school for the “West” or “Second” District was located just west of Burncoat Street, about where the Cumberland Farms is located today, and can be seen on both the 1855 map as well as on the 1898 map. Also noticeable on both maps are the relatively few properties that line the road west to Spencer, most of which are farms, some of which remained in the same family for many decades. The first property along the north side of the road on the 1855 map is the property of “B. Earle.” Benjamin Earle (1804-1875) is another of the ubiquitous Earle clan and, based on an examination of census records, his family lived on the property for over 60 years. Earle, who lists his profession as farmer on census records, died in 1875 but his widow, Mercy (1802-1885), and daughter, Mary Ann Burt (1835-1914), lived in the house for decades after his death. The house would have been located a little past Hank’s Marina, a business that moved here recently from its former location near Smith’s Pond in Cherry Valley, across the street from the 52 mile stone. I suppose there is a market for boats for freshwater purposes, but the jarring site of a business selling boats 55 miles from the ocean in the middle of an area that has, until recently, mainly been farmland, is confusing and unexpected.

Whether the house at 1576 Main Street is the Earle house I cannot say. A report in the files of the Daughters of the American Revolution at the Leicester Public Library, prepared in 1912 by Maria Minott and entitled Houses Built between 1800 and 1850, states that, “In 1846 Benjamin Earle, jr. built upon the site of the ancient tavern of Abner Dunbar on Mount Pleasant. His daughter Mrs. Mary Ann Burt still lives there.”⁷⁸ The house is visible on the 1898 map as the property of “Mrs. M.A. Burt.”

*House at one Woodland Drive, at the Southwest corner of Main Street and Woodland Drive. Local historians claim this house is the oldest house on “West Main Street,” dating to 1735.*

Directly across the street is a house, shown on the 1898 map as the house of “Chas. Adams.” The house, located on the southwest corner of Main Street and Woodland Drive certainly appears old, and Dale Pitzen and Mary Kennedy, in their book Where the Wild Strawberries Are, claim that, “the oldest house on West Main Street was built before 1735 by James Lawton. He ran his saddle-making business here. At the time of the Revolutionary War, this house was the Ephraim Mower Farm. Woodland Drive is to the left of the house.”⁷⁹ If true, this area has a couple of points of interest that are relevant to the Upper Boston Post Road. Washburn refers to the Mower (or Moore, as he calls it above, and as the family is called in the 1790 Census) property as the “farm once owned by Col. Henry Sargent,” which he later says was the property, in 1723, “of William Brown on Mount Pleasant, lately belonging to Colonel Henry Sargent, known as the Mower house.”⁸⁰ He states elsewhere in his History of Leicester, that “in 1833 the dwelling house of the late Col. Henry Sargent was destroyed by fire.”⁸¹ This complicates the idea that the Lawton house is from 1735; either it is not the Mower house, or it is not from 1735, or perhaps both are true. Such are the vagaries of local research– I try to pinpoint the location of a house or a tavern and frequently the information provided is contradictory. What can be said is that Ephraim Mower, and later his son Thomas, lived somewhere around here, until his removal to Worcester. I have already discussed the house of Ephraim Mower in Worcester and the connection of the Mower family to the Chandler family of Worcester in previous entries if the reader wants to follow the Mower family along the Upper Boston Post Road.

Washburn also discusses the tavern keeper Abner Dunbar who, according to Washburn, “during the Revolution kept a tavern at the house standing opposite the Mower place on Mount Pleasant.”⁸² Later, Washburn tells us that, “where Benjamin Earle’s house now stands, there was once a house, in which Mr. Lynde lived and, after him, Abner Dunbar kept a tavern,” and later that, “Mr. Dunbar kept a tavern in the house opposite the Mower House on Mount Pleasant,” which is consistent with the aforementioned pieces of information.⁸³ As I discussed earlier, perhaps this is where George Bruce kept a tavern rather than at the Mount Pleasant house. The only mention of Dunbar in the almanacs of the time are in the 1790s, when he ran a tavern at the Leicester Hotel.

The reader may be wondering why there are so many taverns along the road in the eighteenth century and why they are so relatively close to each other. From Sargent’s near St. Joseph Church to Dunbar’s tavern here on the road the distance is only a little over two miles and yet there were at least four or five separate taverns in operation along this section of the Upper Boston Post Road in the late-eighteenth century. The simple answer is that ~~everyone was an alcoholic in the eighteenth century~~ travel was much more difficult and necessitated more frequent stops, to give water and food to horses, to get out of the rain, or simply to take a break. As I walk the road I can (only dimly) imagine what travel might have been like in the eighteenth century. Ebenezer Parkman, writing in his diary of a journey on horseback of roughly eighteen miles each way on Wednesday, June 30, 1736 from his home in Westborough to the ordination of David Godard as minister in Leicester states that it was “far beyond all my Expectation to have Performed this Journey, out and back, in the Same Day.” For comparison, my father for years drove six days a week from our home in Braintree to his restaurant in West Boylston, 60 miles each way. It has taken me years to walk from the Old State House in Boston to this spot, almost 56 miles along the Upper Boston Post Road, although I have been somewhat distracted. I have walked all the way from Boston to Worcester in three days, and I have walked from Worcester to this point in Leicester (and beyond to the East Brookfield Courthouse, a little past the 61 mile stone) in a single day. Thus, traveling at a walking pace, the trip to this point can be comfortably completed in the best part of four days. In the next entry I will examine rates of travel along the Upper Boston Post Road over time in more detail, as Jenks tavern in Spencer was a major stopping point along the road — even George Washington slept there!

*****

View from the road of part of Soojian Farm, the modern version of the John A. Denny Estate. The red truck in this photograph was “used as the family’s farm stand” according to a local history published in 1997.

I need to get there first though, and I still have about 1.4 miles to go before I reach the border with Spencer. The next farm along the road on the 1855 map is that of Artemas Lamb (1802-1863), whose brother Waldo Lamb lived in the house in front of the golf course. Artemas died in 1863, and Lamb’s nephew Nathan, who previously lived on his father Waldo’s property, is listed as the owner in the 1865 Massachusetts Census. Nathan appears as a farmer on the property through the 1880 Census but later appears to have sold the farm and moved closer to the town center; his name is associated with the house at the northeast corner of Main Street and Lake Avenue, directly across from Rawson Street and overlooking Sargent Pond on the 1898 map (see the photo earlier in this entry and the detailed map of Leicester center from 1898 above). On the 1898 map the Lamb farm is gone, and there is a larger farm called “Prospect Farm” shown, a combination, it appears, of the John A. Denny Estate and the Artemas Lamb farm.

The Denny farm was purchased in 1842, for John A. Denny (1791-1865) and his wife Sally Denny (1788-1884), by their son Charles E. Denny (1815-1856), a successful boot manufacturer in Spencer. John Denny listed himself as a cabinet maker before moving to the new house, but later is listed as a farmer in the census records. After John Denny’s death in 1865, Sally Denny continues to appear in census record, but in the 1880 Census she is listed as the “aunt” of the head of the household, Erastus White, who also listed his occupation as “farmer.” In 1900 the now larger “Prospect Farm” is owned by “Mrs. Charlotte E. Prince” according to the 1898 map. Charlotte Prince is shown on the 1900 Census as the “mother” of Jesse Buxton, the wife of the “Head of Household” Frank Buxton, also a “farmer.” In 1910 the farm is now owned by James E. Smith and his family. According to Pitzen and Kennedy, writing in 1997, “it was purchased in 1948 by the Soojian Family. The quaint old truck overlooking the Boston Post Road is used as the family’s farmstand and was recently featured in Yankee Magazine. Krikor and Marguerite Soojian produce and sell pumpkins, sweet corn and other garden produce. A sure sign of autumn is the site of apples and cider at Soojian’s farmstand.”⁸⁴

Milestone 56, located between 1676 and 1710 Main Street. The milestone has suffered significant damage over the years (see the same stone in an undated photo below) but the “5” can still be read and the top of the “6” is partially legible.

Things have changed since the above was written. The first change is the appearance, on Soojian Drive, of a massive Walmart store on the north side of Main Street. In a conversation with Mike Soojian, the current owner of Soojian Farm, I was told that, for many years the town of Leicester frowned upon development in the West District and that numerous planned commercial projects to be located in the area were shelved. However, the prevailing winds are now pro-development and the West District has now become the wild west. This is apparent from the numerous signs along the road advertising land for sale, as the old farms are no longer considered commercially viable. The eastern section of the Soojian farm was sold to developers for example, and, apparently, this is just the tip of the iceberg, with more housing planned on the lot just east of Soojian Drive. Already development has spread across to the south side of Main Street, where a Starbucks and a Wendy’s beckon the cars leaving the Walmart.

Mike Soojian and his family still produce hay on some of the remaining 150 acres of the still bucolic farmland west of the Walmart development, but the market stand is no more; vegetables and fruits are produced now only for personal consumption. Soojian’s son also operates a junk removal and dumpster rental service on the property, and the iconic red truck is still prominently on display on the property (see photo above), but the number of active farms in Leicester, which numbered 62 in 1900, is rapidly dwindling.⁸⁵ Soojian laments the loss of farming and is resigned to the fact that development is the economic model for the area but is skeptical that the development will do much more than create more traffic along Route 9. All the same, the economic pressure of development is slowly eating away at the area fifty-six miles west of Boston that was principally farm land for centuries.

*****

According to Pitzen and Kennedy, “the western boundary of the farm is located at the 56 mile stone.”⁸⁶ There is indeed a milestone located on the north side of Main Street/Route 9, on the property line between the houses at 1676 Main Street and 1710 Main Street. Mike Soojian told me that 1676 Main Street is his brother’s house and that the property has been subdivided among family members since the 1990s when Where the Wild Strawberries Grow was published, which is consistent with the notion that the stone is at the “western boundary” of the original farm. This stone has sadly been damaged over the years and is almost impossible to read, but an older photograph of the stone closely resembles the modern stone in shape (although the modern stone is severely truncated), and the number 56 can be made out with some effort.

*Undated photograph of the milestone reading “56 miles From Boston.” This is the same stone shown above. Thanks to Joe Lennerton for providing this image.*

Across the street are the remnants of the Leicester Drive-In Movie Theater, dating to the 1960s, which was still in operation when Pitzen and Kennedy’s book was published, along with the neighboring 1960s-era restaurant, which “still retains its drive-in wings, although pony-tailed car hops are no longer in evidence” and operates today as Las Cocinas Taqueria Mexicana. Just west of the Drive-In is Town Beach Road, which leads to Burncoat Park and Burncoat Pond, as well as to a senior retirement center. The main road then bifurcates; the old road makes a long curve north and then west, while Route 9 continues in a straight line, before the two roads meet again at the border with Spencer, about 0.7 miles away. The property near this junction was owned by the Hersey family in 1776, according to Emory Washburn, with Elijah and Calvin Hersey each building a house. Later, the land, as well as the Elijah Hersey house, was owned by Captain David Trask (1765-1831). On the 1855 map the land, on both sides of the street, is owned by “Mrs. Trask,” while in 1870 it is labelled “The heirs of JP Trask.” Part of the Hersey land and one of the houses in the area was owned by the McFarland family for decades, first David and then his son Dwight. as seen on the 1855, 1870, and 1898 maps. The McFarlands listed their occupation in census reports as “farmer,” as did most of the property owners along the road west from Mount Pleasant in the nineteenth century. The farms are disappearing, another sign across the street advertising land for sale beckons passersby, and commercial and residential development has already begun to dot the landscape. What will the data from future census reports tell us about the changes to West Leicester? I am not sure I want to find out.

The irony is that most of the population growth in Leicester occurred in the decades immediately after the Second World War, when little development occurred in this part of Leicester. Although the town had tripled in population over the course of the nineteenth century, the population had only reached 3,416 residents, according to the census of 1900. By 1940 the population had increased to 4,851 residents, only 1,400 more people than forty years earlier. The population of Leicester nearly doubled in the following forty years, reaching 9,446 residents by 1980. After this spurt of growth, the population increased more slowly, reaching 10,471 by 2000 and 11,087 residents in the most recent census in 2020, about 1,600 new residents in the most recent forty years of census data. The impulse for all this new development is therefore somewhat mystifying and is likely a response to the general rise in the cost of housing in eastern Massachusetts in the past few decades. However, the response might be more about cashing in than about real prospective population growth. Perhaps I am mistaken, but it seems that the impulse for development is based on a misguided impression of how fast the overall population of Massachusetts is growing and an optimistic belief that building housing 55 or more miles from Boston will attract home buyers desperate to stay in the Boston area. If the job prospects are mainly Walmart, Starbucks, and Cumberland Farms, my suspicion is that they will flee to warmer locales, where they can work the same job with cheaper housing.

*****

The Walk, Part Four: Breezy Bend (0.7 miles; Mile 57)

Breezy Bend, Leicester, Massachusetts. Main Street deviates from a newer section of Route 9 for the last three-quarters of a mile in town before reaching the border with Spencer. This is the most bucolic section of the walk in Leicester.

*****

All maps prior to 1989 show the main road curving to the north just before the final push west to the border with Spencer. However, by 2012 the maps show a more direct path to the border with Spencer along a newly-built section of Route 9 called McNeil Highway, a road that bypasses the old road almost to the border, when the old road and the new road meet before continuing into Spencer. This is a fortuitous development because this final 0.7.-mile section of the walk in Leicester along Main Street is one of the most tranquil and pleasant sections of the entire road, passing through a pastoral landscape that seems timeless, unlike the burst of development along Route 9.

It turns out that it is not only the Roman Roads that lead into the open. The area is known as Breezy Bend, perhaps because the road bends here and it is quite open and, you guessed it, breezy! To start, there is an actual farm at the junction of Main Street and Route 9 called Breezy Gardens. Apparently twelve acres are farmed here in Leicester, and they also farm 80 acres in Spencer and another 40 acres in Paxton. The image above shows some of the farm land under cultivation.

On the northeast corner of Main Street and McNeil Highway is the only blemish on the final segment of the walk through Leicester, a bland and uninviting building with a sign reading Sunnyside* at the entrance. It turns out to be a cannabis dispensary plunked down in the middle of the fields lining the road, a particularly confusing building that makes me wonder whether there are fumes emanating from the building that have affected my thinking. Once past the incongruously-situated building the road opens up, with farmland on both sides of the street, American Tree Sparrows flitting to and fro along the roadside and the edges of the fields, very little traffic, and a beautiful farmhouse located on the north side of the bend in the road in the distance. This is a section of the walk that I wish would take forever, the type of scenery I had hoped to reach one day when I set out from Boston all those years ago. In truth, it is only about a five-minute walk before I reach the house at 1832 Main Street, the Edward Warren House.

*Following the Upper Boston Post Road as it makes the turn at Breezy Bend.*

The Warren family lived in this area for many generations, first producing leather goods and then, “after three generations of the Warren family dominating the leather business, Edward Warren [1846-1923] went into the dairy business. His house was built circa 1846 and is located at Breezy Bend on West Main Street.”⁸⁷ Various members of the Warren family appear on all the old maps of Leicester, with a particular cluster here at Breezy Bend. Although the 1846 house appears to be the most prominent, Warren family members also lived in houses on both sides of the street almost to the border with Spencer. According to a memorial marker in Rawson Brook Cemetery, Ebenezer Warren was the first Warren to settle in Leicester, arriving in 1744. Washburn mentions Ebenezer Warren in his list of residents along the road in 1776: “Ebenezer Warren [lived] where Elijah died; was father of Elijah Warren.”⁸⁸ Elijah Warren (1759-1843) was the father of Joseph Warren (1784-1865), a “shoemaker” who lived on the northwest corner of Watson Street and Main Street, according to the 1855 map, and of Henry E. Warren (1809-1865), who is listed variously as a “tanner,” a “currier,” and a “producer of finished leather goods.” A tanner is “one whose occupation is to tan hides, or convert them into leather by the use of tan,” according to Webster’s Dictionary, while a currier is a person who “helps to bring tanned hides or skins to salable form.” Henry E. Warren is the owner of most of the property on both sides of the road on the 1855 map, property that Washburn states “belonged to his grandfather” and a tannery is prominently shown on the map on the south side of Main Street near the intersection with Watson Street.⁸⁹ Apparently this was a replacement tannery, as Washburn states that, “on October 9, 1848, Henry Warren’s tan-house was burned —situated half a mile north of the Great Road, in the West part of the town.”⁹⁰

This would place the previous tannery somewhere along Watson Street, in the vicinity of Shaw Brook, which flows from nearby Shaw Pond, one of the two “natural” ponds in Leicester (the other is Henshaw Pond, south of the Upper Boston Post Road near Henshaw Street), the remaining “artificial” bodies of water in Leicester all formed by dams. Shaw Pond also “forms one of the sources of the Chicopee River.”⁹¹ In other words, it is part of the Quaboag River watershed, which eventually feeds into the Chicopee River many miles down the Upper Boston Post Road in the town of Palmer. A story for another day but an indication that the road here straddles two watersheds: the French River, which flows south, and the Quaboag, which flows west. A short distance after the road passes into Spencer the Upper Boston Post Road will transition permanently into the Quaboag/Chicopee/Connecticut River watershed for the rest of its passage through Massachusetts and for most of its route in Connecticut. Not only has the high point of the Upper Boston Post Road been crossed, but shortly the final transition from “Boston-facing” watersheds will be replaced by “New York-facing” watersheds. The Red Sox/Yankees divide is still some ways off, but Boston Rambles is transitioning to Central and Western Massachusetts Rambles and, sometime after that, to Connecticut Rambles. New York Rambles is lurking on the horizon.

*****

*Edward Warren House (1846), 1832 West Main Street, Leicester, Massachusetts*.

*****

According to Pitzen and Kennedy in Where the Wild Strawberries Grow, the Warren family, and the nearby Watson family, for whom Watson Street is named, at various times each owned Shaw Pond. The pond was later acquired by the Myrick and Sugden Wire Factory in Spencer, which in turn sold it to Spencer Water in 1883. Apparently it is now part of the town of Spencer’s water supply and is currently under a 99-year lease from the town of Leicester.⁹² An interesting fact that also appears in the description of Shaw Pond in Pitzen and Kennedy’s book is that “Massachusetts Law now states that any pond greater than 10 acres before damming cannot be privately owned,” meaning Shaw Pond cannot today be owned by the Warrens, Watsons, or a factory in Spencer.⁹³ Shaw Pond, with Shaw Brook flowing westward from the pond into Spencer and eventually into the Connecticut River, is shown on Peter Sylvester’s 1795 map of Leicester captioned “Fish Pond, called Shaw Pond, about 80 Acres.”

The Road Ahead. West Main Street in Leicester curves south at the last minute, to rejoin McNeil Highway (Route 9), one hundred yards before the border with Spencer. As is obvious from this photograph, the road once continued straight, across the property today of Everlast Nursery (behind the barrier), and then continued up the hill in Spencer past the Spencer Country Inn, the building on the hill ahead.

After passing the Warren house, the road heads due west to reach Watson Street, the third “old” road that branches off from the “Great” or “Post” or “Country” Road to Springfield. The main road continues due west from here almost to the border with Spencer before curving slightly to rejoin with McNeil Highway (Route 9) for the last one hundred yards in Leicester. Walking along West Main Street from Watson Street, the road passes more lovely farm houses and one more farm, Everlast Nursery, which sits on the property long owned by Daniel T. Rice and his heirs, shown on the 1870 and the 1898 map as the last house in Leicester. Many of the older census forms compiled for the town of Leicester begin with “Dwelling #1” which is frequently the house owned by “D.T. Rice” or “D.E. Rice,” as the forms often begin at the border with Spencer and move first along West Main Street toward Leicester center. For example, in the 1900 Census, the first page of the Leicester section in Worcester County begins with “Dwelling #1” and “Family #1,” Daniel E. Rice, 56, a “farmer,” and his wife Annie, 49, who was born in Prince Edward Island, Canada. Incidentally, Dwelling #2 is Gleason Warren, Dwelling #3 is Horace Warren, and Dwelling #6 is Edward Warren, living in the house built by his father Henry. Warrens continue to appear in the 1930 and 1940 Census (the most recent available) as farmers. As far as I know, there are no members of the Warren family living in the neighborhood anymore.

Looking west along Main Street as I pass Everlast Nursery, the former Rice farmstead, I can see ahead of me, in the distance, a road leading up the hill over the border in Spencer, passing directly in front of an old building, the Spencer Country Inn. It is obvious, as I walk along the current road, that the old road, instead of curving south as the road does today, must have followed a straight course here (see photo) and crossed straight through the land now owned by Everlast Nursery, before climbing the small hill and passing directly by the old building on the hill. The old maps all show the road heading due west as it reaches the border with Spencer. As the reader will soon discover, there are many artifacts, including milestone 57 located just over the border in front of the entrance to the Spencer Country Inn, which indicate that the course of the old route of the Upper Boston Post Road in the eastern-most part of the neighboring town of Spencer is not the same as the road along which traffic passes into Spencer today. Stay tuned for more in the next installment!

*****

The 5.3 mile-long walk through Leicester has ended, not with one fairly brief entry as planned but rather with three long entries. Although the last mile of the walk through the town is more representative of the bucolic farmland through which I had initially (and naively) thought I would be walking, “facts on the ground,” as the saying goes, made me realize I needed to change gears and adjust my plans. The complexity of Leicester, with its old factories and dense housing in Cherry Valley reminiscent of neighboring Worcester, its idyllic Town Common replete with a steepled white church, an old tavern, and stately late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century residences, which belie a more industrial past, and the built up area along Main Street west of the Common, which provides more direct evidence of a town that owes much of its current shape to the manufacture of a seemingly obscure product of real significance, all forced me to reconsider my heretofore airy plans to wander peacefully through the bucolic rural countryside of Central Massachusetts on my speedy way to Springfield, collecting an artifact or anecdote now and again that would confirm I was heading down the right road, after which I could then resume my more detailed study of the history of the Upper Boston Post Road in the “big city.”

The towns between Worcester and Springfield are much more complex and interesting than I had imagined before I set out on my walk, and these entries will have to reflect that complexity. Yes, it slows me down. Yes, I would like to move faster and finish this project so that I can resume other projects of importance to me. I would be doing a disservice to this project though, if I did not approach it in a way that I feel does at least some justice to the original purpose of this walk, to discover as much as possible about the Upper Boston Post Road. It turns out there is a lot more in these small towns than initially seemed likely. It turns out that this ancient trace leads somewhere and that the route is as interesting as the destination. So, my crusade continues, albeit at a slightly slower pace than I imagined. Then again, as Erling Kagge reminds us, “the essence of walking is slowness,” and he managed to reach the North Pole, the South Pole, and the top of Mount Everest on foot. I am only walking to Springfield.⁹⁴ For now.

*****

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Suzanne Hall and the staff at the Leicester Public Library for all of their assistance. Thanks also to Mike Soojian for his willingness to take the time to discuss the changes to the area he has lived in his entire life. Also special thanks to Joe Lennerton, Chair of the Leicester Historical Commission, and to Don Lennerton, Past Chair of the Leicester Historical Commission, current Member of the Leicester Historical Commission, and a great ambassador for Leicester.

Distance traveled in this entry along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road: 2.8 miles.

Total Distance traveled thus far along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road from Worcester Courthouse to Springfield “Meeting House” (eight entries): 9.6 miles.

Total Distance traveled along the original route of the road from the Old State House in Boston for this project: 56.4 miles.

Total Distance covered for all the walks described in Boston Rambles: 117.9 miles

Posted in Elections, History, Milestones, Population, Roads, Upper Boston Post Road on 23 February 2026 and tagged Elections President, Leicester, Milestones, Old Roads, PostRoad
No Comments »

Boston Rambles

A Rambler Walks and Talks About the Hub of the Universe

Leicester, Massachusetts, #3.

Savoring the Fruits of Leicester

Part Three– From Factory to Farm.

Upper Boston Post Road #22 (UBPR #22)

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Recent Posts

Categories

Recent Comments

Pages

Archives

Meta

Leicester, Massachusetts, #3.

Savoring the Fruits of Leicester

Part Three– From Factory to Farm.

Upper Boston Post Road #22 (UBPR #22)

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Recent Posts

Categories

Tags

Recent Comments

Pages

Archives

Meta