Spencer, Massachusetts, #1.

A Faithful Walk through the Interior

Part One– A Midstate Meander

Upper Boston Post Road #23 (UBPR #23)

“And both that morning equally lay,

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

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I shall be telling this with a sigh.

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

Robert Frost, excerpt from The Road Not Taken (1915)

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“It cannot be expected in the history of a town situated in the interior, like Spencer, that many facts or incidents would have happened, connected with its earliest settlement, and but few events in the succeeding stages of its existence, would excite much interest in the general reader…the annals of its earliest period can exhibit no details of bloody conflicts with the Indian, nor can it boast of having produced any great and illustrious characters, either in peace or war. No exciting or interesting details of this kind, will form any part of this history. All that is necessary, and all that may be expected, is a faithful detail of names, dates, facts, incidents and events, such as have occurred with little variation, in most of the towns of New England.”

James Draper, Preface to History of Spencer (1840)

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Introduction.

And yet… as I walk the route of the Upper Boston Post Road through the small towns of Central Massachusetts I begin to appreciate the understated, almost sarcastic, tone of James Draper’s lugubrious preface. It would appear that the author did not actually expect, or indeed even want, anyone to read his history of the town in which he lived his entire life.¹According to Henry Tower, Draper was born in Spencer in 1778 and died there in 1868, practiced law and served in virtually every one of the town’s offices, including as the long-serving Justice of the Peace and Town Trial Justice (from 1810 until “he became quite an old man”); in addition, he served twelve years as Representative to the General Court, two years as State Senator, twenty-seven years as Town Assessor, twelve years as Town Treasurer, ten years as a Selectman, and one year as Town Clerk. See Henry Tower, Historical Sketches Relating to Spencer, Massachusetts. Four Volumes.(W.J. Heffernan, 1901-1909), Volume III, 248. As I discussed in a previous entry, my initial belief as I began my walk out of Worcester on the way to Springfield was the naive idea that the small towns west of Worcester were, and always had been, sleepy rural settlements predominantly inhabited by farmers widely spread and that facts, events, and artifacts relevant to the history of the Upper Boston Post Road would be scarce. My walk through the town of Leicester put paid to that hypothesis, and, having read James Draper’s History of Spencer along with several other books about the history of the town of Spencer, Massachusetts, I realize that Draper is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the haughty reader who believes nothing can be gained from perusing the history of “a town situated in the interior,” what might be called a backwater by somebody who has not actually walked through it.

Draper is not wrong: the “names, dates, facts, incidents and events” are little varied from those of other New England towns through which the Upper Boston Post Road has passed and about which I have written. This is like saying that War and Peace is about some Russian family or that Casablanca is some love story set in a dusty Moroccan town in the 1940s. Every story is “a faithful detail of names, dates, facts, incidents and events, such as have occurred with little variation.” The “little variation” is what makes it interesting. Spencer has its own story to tell with different characters who make different choices in a different setting which result in different outcomes. So the Battle of Lexington and Concord happened forty miles east of Spencer and the minutemen of Spencer did not make it to the clash. The contributions of the citizens of Spencer to the American Revolution, to the Civil War, to the Industrial Revolution is not as flashy as those of Concord or Gettysburg or Lowell, but the story is similar in Spencer with unique characters who played a role in these events nonetheless.

I spent my childhood in Bermuda, and my mother and sister still live there. People often express astonishment that I don’t want to spend every waking moment hanging out on the pink sands of Elbow Beach or relaxing in a hammock between two cedar trees in Spanish Point. My response that “Bermuda is Framingham, only you can’t leave” puzzles people. What I mean by that flip comment is that, aside from the fact that Bermuda is roughly the same size and has roughly the same population as Framingham, Massachusetts, it is a place, like other places, with people living in it, with the added problem, at least it is a problem in my mind, that it is located seven hundred miles out to sea, so that the only way to get, as locals say, “off the rock” is to fly or take a boat across the ocean. Once you get past the subtropical climate and the exoticism of the islands, when you actually have to live there you quickly realize that it has many of the same problems as any other place: people that irritate you, crime, pollution, traffic, high prices, weather (it is not all sun, sea breezes, and temperatures in the 70s–think hurricanes), and lots of other unpleasant things from which I will spare the reader.

Yes, it is different from Massachusetts, but when I moved to Braintree, Massachusetts in February 1977, I had never seen snow and there was a lot of it. It was extremely exciting to me…for a few days. Then I had to get used to living here on a daily basis and the enthusiasm quickly waned once I had to deal with making friends, dressing properly, sloshing through half-melted slushy piles to the bus stop, figuring out what was cool and what was not, all the dumb Bermuda Triangle jokes, and so on. Bermuda is great, even if I do not particularly want to live there, and so is Massachusetts, where I actually live, but most of life is not spent in a hammock or lying on a beach, going to a Celtics game or cross-country skiing in the Berkshires; rather, it is spent on the tedious activities required to live, regardless of the climate. History is about the lives of people, and people spend most of their lives trying to live, whether it is under a sub-tropical sun or on a cold day in January in Massachusetts.

What I am trying to say, in this meandering introduction to my walk through the town of Spencer, Massachusetts, along the Upper Boston Post Road, is that not only are all places fundamentally similar, with varying degrees of different facts, dates, names, climates, languages, and so on, but that just because in some places a specific event occurred or some other town is the birthplace of a famous individual does not mean that the nearby town which lacks such well-known events or individuals is somehow less important. Spencer is not much different from Leicester or from Shrewsbury or Framingham or Concord or from any New England town. In truth, Spencer is not that different even from Bermuda once you remove the gaudy sub-tropical make-up, but it has a story similar to other more “famous” places, a story as interesting as any of these places, if you look for it.

The Upper Boston Post Road traverses the town of Spencer from east to west for a little more than four miles, which is the reason I am here in the first place. The road itself is reason enough for me to visit. Is it the Camino de Santiago? No. Does the road through Spencer have its own charm and its own story that is worth describing? Yes! All that is necessary in this essay is to describe the road through the town of Spencer, providing a faithful detail of names, dates, facts, incidents, and events. If you are looking for big battles or tropical delights, you are probably reading the wrong essay. On the other hand, George Washington slept here (and not in Bermuda, or in Leicester, or in Framingham, or in Shrewsbury, or in Concord), so….read on to find out more!

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Way Leads on to Way.

56.4 miles from the Old State House in Boston along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road. As I stand at the border between Leicester and Spencer on a cold and windy January day, taking in the views across the barren, snow-covered fields that line the road here, I begin to second guess my decision to embark on this walk along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road. What can I possibly gain by meandering through this empty landscape at least a mile from the nearest place I can get inside to warm up for a few minutes (a Dunkin Donuts lies 1.1 miles ahead and a Starbucks is 1.1 miles in the rear view mirror, neither is a very tempting option but at least they have heat!) What a dope I am, I reflect, as I attempt to walk along the edge of busy Route 9, which has no sidewalk here, between the cars zooming past me and the dirty snow piled up along the edges. I am in the middle of nowhere, it is cold, I am sure I am going to be killed by someone looking at their phone while bombing blithely along the road in their Ford Enormo SUV, and it will be my own fault!

As is often the case as I make my way along the road, it turns out to be darkest before the dawn. For even here, along a “boring” stretch of road in what appears to be the middle of nowhere, not only I am rewarded with yet another of the serendipitous discoveries which occur with seeming regularity and have absolutely no connection to the history of the Upper Boston Post Road, but there is also an interesting development related to the Upper Boston Post Road only steps ahead from where I stand at the border. My sense of desolation vanishes abruptly, and I am immediately intrigued by the new possibilities that suddenly occur to me and that promise to make my efforts along this part of the road much more interesting and rewarding.

For, as I cross the border from Leicester into Spencer, I encounter a sign for something called the “Midstate Trail” about which I heretofore knew nothing. The “middle of nowhere” turns out to be the middle of Massachusetts.²Of course, my “Boston-centric” bias initially failed to comprehend how the Midstate Trail, only 57 miles from Boston, could be in the “middle” of a state in which the westernmost towns are more than 130 miles from Boston. The answer is, of course, that Boston is not the easternmost point in Massachusetts, as any resident of Rockport or Provincetown could have told me. In any case, the Midstate Trail might not be exactly in the middle of the state but it is close enough. This sign is for a 92-mile trail that begins at the New Hampshire border and crosses Worcester County (and Massachusetts) from north to south to the Rhode Island border, crossing the east to west route of the Upper Boston Post Road right here at the border between the towns of Spencer and Leicester. The trail continues south from Route 9 (the Upper Boston Post Road at the border) along Polar Spring Road for 0.4 miles before the road peters out and the trail enters the woodlands that make up the 250-acre Massachusetts Audubon property called Burncoat Pond Wildlife Sanctuary. The Midstate Trail then continues across the sanctuary and crosses Greenville Street before entering the vast Spencer State Forest and continuing on to Charlton and Rhode Island.

The Midstate trail was first developed in the 1920s to connect Mount Watatic to Mount Wachusett, but the trail fell into disuse. In the 1970s various organizations, including the Appalachian Mountain Club, along with many local volunteers, set out to revive the trail and continue it across the entirety of Worcester County. It is principally designed as a hiking trail, using existing trails and passing through large tracts of public land. According to Wikipedia, “Other sections of the trail route follow old town roads and farm roads abandoned during the agrarian shift to the mid-western United States in the late 19th century.” The landscape through which it passes is quite varied as “the trail route generally follows a highland watershed divide that separates the drainage of four river systems: the Blackstone River (southeast); the Nashua River, which is part of the Merrimack River watershed (northeast); the Ware River and Millers River watersheds which are absorbed by the Connecticut River watershed (west); and the French River in Oxford [and Leicester and this part of Spencer, ed.], Massachusetts, which is part of the south flowing Quinebaug River watershed,” again quoting from the Wikipedia article on the trail.

My interest is piqued for many reasons. First, it presents another opportunity for me to walk a new trail and the fact that it crosses the state from north to south is enough for me to contemplate a future walking adventure along the trail. Second, the idea of passing through various watersheds appeals to me, as any reader of these entries will have learned from my long descriptions of the various watersheds through which the Upper Boston Post Road passes. The changing watersheds are indicative of topographical changes that often result in subtle transformations of the landscape through which the road passes, and are best appreciated on foot in my opinion. As it happens, the Upper Boston Post Road at the border between Leicester and Spencer is almost exactly on the divide between two major watersheds (see image above), the French River watershed (part of the larger Quinebaug River watershed) and the Quaboag River watershed (part of the very large Connecticut River watershed). Most of the walk in this entry straddles the two watersheds, before the Upper Boston Post Road enters the Quaboag River watershed for good near 350 Main Street in Spencer, after which the road passes through watersheds that flow exclusively into the Connecticut River.

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Although I am tempted to head immediately south down Polar Spring Road along the Midstate Trail to escape this busy stretch of the Upper Boston Post Road and meander instead through the fields and the woods, I manage to restrain myself and continue west along Route 9, which is also called Main Street in the town of Spencer. This is the modern version of the Upper Boston Post Road, but this first section of a little more than a mile through the eastern part of Spencer (1.3 miles from the border with Leicester to “Sibley’s Corner” at the junction of Paxton Road and Main Street) has few landmarks and little of historic interest as we shall soon see. The road curves slightly northwest at this point, and I pass the Spencer Country Inn on a rise to the left (that is, to the south of the road, more about this building shortly). After passing a few nondescript businesses and houses, in about a quarter of a mile I reach the intersection with Bond Street. The road then heads due southwest for another one-third of a mile to reach Donnelly Road, passing primarily farm land on the south side of the road and some woods, wetlands, and the occasional business along the north side of the road. Again, no buildings of historical or architectural significance appear along the busy road. A further half-mile along a mostly straight road heading southwest brings me to Paxton Road, where the commercial and residential development dramatically increases as I enter what is now the “white” section of town on Google maps, the more developed center, as opposed to the “green” section of the map which I have been following from the border with Leicester. Superficially, this first section of the walk superficially is not particularly interesting. There are apparently few historical artifacts along the road and there is not much to write about, it seems. Draper’s preface reverberates in my head, and I begin to think perhaps he was literally warning me not to undertake this investigation into the route of the Upper Boston Post Road in Spencer.

Later, in the course of studying old maps and researching the history of the road and of Spencer, I make a couple of discoveries that increase my interest in this area. Coupled with my newly-discovered interest in the Midstate Trail, instead of gloom at the prospect of being stuck in the bleak Spencer marches, I am now excited to return and look around the area with a more careful eye, in better weather, of course. The principal discovery is that the somewhat dull route I described above of the first 1.3 miles of the Upper Boston Post Road through Spencer is, for long stretches, not the original route of the old road. The route of the road in eastern Spencer is quite a bit more complicated and interesting than it first appears to be, and the key to understanding the changes to the road and the history of the area lie in the landscape south of the current road through which the Midstate Trail passes.

Another reason to be excited about the Midstate Trail is that it is one in a series of linked trails in the large (nearly 700 acres) area of preserved land south of Route 9, and one of these trails turns out to be the old route of the Upper Boston Post Road. I will be able to escape, at least temporarily, the somewhat tedious and unpleasant walk along Route 9/Main Street and will walk instead through the bucolic fields of Sibley Farm. But I am getting ahead of myself. I need to get back to the beginning of the Upper Boston Post Road because, to paraphrase Robert Frost, knowing how way leads on to way, I doubt if I should ever come back. So, refreshed with the knowledge that there are trails off the main road that pass through some lovely landscapes and that at least one of these trails is the original route of the Upper Boston Post Road, I resolve to return to this area in the spring and to do a proper walk through the adjacent conservation land when I do not have to trudge through snow…

…Thus I find myself, on a mild mid-April morning, back at the junction of Polar Spring Road and Main Street on the border between Leicester and Spencer and turn south on Polar Spring Road to follow the Midstate Trail from this point through the Burncoat Pond Wildlife Sanctuary to the Greenville Street crossing, then return to the Upper Boston Post Road along the Sibley Trail, which leads north from the Greenville Street parking lot of the Audubon Sanctuary and passes through the Sibley Farm conservation land adjoining the Audubon Sanctuary. I follow a series of connecting trails west from the Sibley Trail leading over 1075-foot Moose Hill, and then continue northeast down the hill along the Snowbird Trail until I reach the intersection with the Old Boston Post Road Trail. From this junction I head west to retrace the lost route of the old road to its inevitable dead end in the woods, before retracing my steps and returning along the Old Boston Post Road Trail to the junction of Main Street and Donnelly Road. Here is a link to the trail map of the conservation land.

Finally I head east along Main Street/Route 9 to the starting point of my meander, at Route 9 and Polar Spring Road, completing a loop walk of a little over five miles, of which only a small fraction is part of the Upper Boston Post Road but which is both a lovely walk and integrally linked to the story of the road in this part of Spencer, particularly as almost all the land through which the road passes for the next mile or so was once part of a large estate called Sibley Farm.

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Mile 57. The Road Less Traveled By.

“What’s Past is Prologue.”

Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1.

The reader who has been able to follow my meandering thoughts and the meandering walks described thus far in this meandering entry should be congratulated. The purpose of the detailed descriptions of the trails and roads in the eastern part of Spencer is to establish that the route of the original road deviated significantly from the current route of the road along Route 9/Main Street. I will now return, for a third time, to the junction where I stood in January bemoaning my fate and follow the Upper Boston Post Road west from the border with Leicester, hewing as closely as possible to the route of the original road. The diversions along the trails of the Sibley Farm conservation land and the more traditional walk along Route 9/Main Street will be integrated into this description as I walk west, sometimes on trails through fields and woods, sometimes on the modern road. Of the 1.3 miles from the border between Spencer and Leicester at Polar Spring Road to the end of this first walk in Spencer, just past the junction of Main Street and Paxton Road, approximately 0.6 miles is along the modern road and 0.7 miles is through land today part of either the Spencer Country Inn or Sibley Farm conservation area.

Almost all of the above walking is in the French River watershed, which is also the area through which almost all of the previous walk through Leicester took place. The Sibley farm property is located in both watersheds, with the business end of the farm (the dairy barn, for example) located along Route 9/Main Street in the western section of the property in the Quaboag River watershed, while the Sibley mansion, about which more later, was located on top of Moose Hill, which is on the dividing line between the two watersheds, as is the Spencer Country Inn, just ahead of me as I stand at the border between Leicester and Spencer at the junction of Main Street/Route 9 and Polar Spring Road. The walk described in this essay ends a little west of the junction of Paxton Road and Main Street, directly opposite the old dairy operations of Sibley Farm, a junction that was traditionally known as “Sibley’s Corner.”

Polar Spring Road, as can be seen from the above map, is also in the French River watershed, although the Worcester-based company with the similar name is located in the Blackstone River watershed, as discussed in the entries on Worcester and Cherry Valley (Leicester). Although the watersheds are not connected, Polar Spring Road and Polar Beverages are in fact connected. What began as a whiskey distillery in the 1880s founded by Dennis Crowley eventually transformed into the iconic Polar Beverage company. The company acquired the Polar name in 1916 and purchased the Leicester Polar Spring Company located here on the border of Spencer and Leicester in 1918, hence the name of the road (see the image above). Prohibition forced the company to focus on non-alcoholic beverages and resulted in the growth of their seltzer lines in particular, which is what they are known for today. Ten miles from the center of Worcester and it is clear that this area is still a part of the Worcester metropolitan area, even if the town is located in the Massachusetts First Congressional District centered around Springfield.³Spencer only joined the First Congressional District after the 2020 United States Census-based redistricting. Previously Spencer had been located in the Worcester-centered Second Congressional District. I will return to the politics and demographics of Spencer in a future entry.

A driveway at the Polar Spring Road/Main Street junction leads past a driving range and up a short hill to the entrance of the Spencer Country Inn. The first of the discoveries I referred to earlier is that the original route of the Upper Boston Post Road as it crossed into Spencer from Leicester was clearly not the same road as the current Route 9/Main Street road layout. This information is derived principally from a close study of the oldest available maps of Spencer. Fortunately, numerous high-quality maps of the town of Spencer have been produced in the last two centuries, which enables me to identify deviations from the current version of the Upper Boston Post Road as it passes through the town. Most of the route through the town of Spencer has always roughly followed today’s Main Street/Route 9, but in the less-developed areas east and west of the center of town the road has undergone significant changes over the centuries.

The first significant change is right at the border with Leicester, where the current road curves north around the property of the Spencer Country Inn. However, a careful look at the 1795 map of the town, produced by an unknown surveyor as part of the required survey of each of the towns in Massachusetts, as well as an examination of the very detailed 1830 map of the town by William Baldwin (see below), clearly show the road following a more direct east to west trajectory rather than heading northwest at the border as it enters Spencer and reaches Bond Street, the first road that intersects with the main road in Spencer. On this third walk beginning at the border with Leicester, instead of turning down Polar Spring Road or continuing along Route 9/Main Street, I walk up the driveway of the Spencer Country Inn, along the early route of the Upper Boston Post Road.

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The hypothesis that the original route of the Upper Boston Post Road passed south of the building that is now the Spencer Country Inn is supported by some of the local historians of Spencer. Jeffrey Fiske, a long-time school teacher in Spencer and local historian, writes in his History of Spencer, Massachusetts, 1875-1975, that the road “originally passed in front or south of the house (the building that is currently the Spencer Country Inn), so that today the front of the house faces away from Route 9.”⁴Jeffrey Fiske, History of Spencer, Massachusetts, 1875-1975 (Spencer Historical Commission, 1990), 27. In other words, the driveway leading up to the entrance and parking lot of the Spencer Country Inn was originally the route of the Upper Boston Post Road.

What appears to be solid evidence in support of this hypothesis sits next to the fence in front of the building that now serves as the inn. In the midst of the lovely grounds of the Spencer Country Inn, next to the fence along the north side of the driveway, sits one of the reddish milestones that are much more commonly encountered west of Worcester along the Upper Boston Post Road. The milestone is almost exactly one mile distant from the previous milestone (Milestone #56, between 1676 and 1710 Main Street in Leicester), and is “another stone in good condition and is a dark orange/red color,” according to Mary and James Gage, in Milestones and Guideposts of Massachusetts and Southeastern New Hampshire.⁵Mary Gage and James Gage, Milestones and Guideposts of Massachusetts and Southeastern New Hampshire (Powwow River Books, 2014), 82. It reads “57 Mile From Boston” which is very clearly inscribed (see photograph) and is accompanied by a small wooden sign which reads “Boston Post Road, Franklin Marker, 57 Miles from Boston, 1767” most of which I do not believe, as I have stated many times before.⁶Also, the milestone says “57 miles from Boston,” but is technically 56.6 miles from Boston based on my calculations, a slight discrepancy that has continued since milestone #47 in Worcester. Although the series of stones west of Worcester appear to be fairly similar and it is certainly possible they were placed at roughly the same time, perhaps even in 1767, Benjamin Franklin almost certainly did not measure and place these stones as the popular story goes. I will save the reader another rant on this topic, but as the stones to be found ahead all have this sign next to them, at some point I will have to enter the fray once again and provide more evidence refuting the “Franklin Marker” hypothesis.

Ironically, one of the local historians with a longstanding interest in the milestones of central Massachusetts has cast doubt about whether the “57 Mile” stone is in the correct location. In his book about the Post Road, Eric Jaffe (see my review here) travels the road in this area with Robert “Bob” Wilder (1933-2015), a local historian who “made the Post Road his passionate avocation.”⁷Eric Jaffe, The King’s Best Highway: The Lost History of the Boston Post Road, the Route that Made America (Scribner, 2010), 255. Wilder, a longtime resident of Brookfield, spent years studying and writing about the prehistory, settlement, and history of the many towns that made up the original settlement of Brookfield, through which many miles of the Upper Boston Post Road pass. Jaffe accompanied Wilder on a tour of the Post Road from Leicester through Warren, visiting “the nineteen consecutive milestones still standing between Springfield and Worcester.”⁸Jaffe, 255. Milestone #56 in Leicester to milestone #74 in Warren, although there are also three more in Leicester: #52, #53, and #54, with #55 missing. Jaffe relates this story about visiting milestone #57: “We had to turn off the road to find one, because, according to Bob, the owner of the Spencer Country Inn wanted it on his premises, to attract business.”⁹Jaffe, 256.

This thought occurred to me the first time I visited the milestone, having read the book long before I had ever traveled to Spencer along the Upper Boston Post Road (the book was published while I was in the middle of a previous project, Walking the Post Road, a walk along the Lower Boston Post Road from Boston to New York). It seemed natural that the stone might have been located along a forlorn stretch of busy Route 9 and that somebody thought it a good idea to move it to the front of the charming building housing the Spencer Country Inn, both for aesthetic reasons and for safe-keeping, and I accepted the story as likely accurate.

However, when I began to look at the sources I had collected about the milestone and about the route of the road, the story did not match the evidence. The first significant difficulty with this story is found in the 1971 National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination Form, a report detailing the location and status of the “1767 Milestones on the Old Post Road from Boston to Springfield.”¹⁰This report can be accessed on the Massachusetts Cultural Resources Information System (MACRIS). Milestone #57 has an entry, SPE.909, which contains a link to the report. As a reminder, MACRIS is a digital a repository for information principally about old structures. The reference number is the official number of the structure or neighborhood under discussion, which is typically a three-letter code for the town or city (SPE, in this case, for Spencer), followed by unique numbers or letters. Historic structure reports provided by local preservation organizations constitute the majority of the entries. There is a photograph of the stone, taken sometime before 1971, which shows the milestone sitting, according to the accompanying caption, “adjacent to Ghize Chevrolet Building off Route #9. Building burnt down marker moved to front of Coventry Nursing Home.” The stone is listed as being owned by Glynes P. Ghize. A follow-up photograph on the next page, presumably taken after the marker was moved but also before 1971, shows the milestone against a white picket fence “adjacent to Coventry Hall Nursing Home,” a building that looks suspiciously like the building housing the Spencer Country Inn.

A quick bit of internet sleuthing and combing through local histories makes the story a little more clear. I will return shortly to give a more detailed history of the property and of the building housing the Spencer Country Inn, but for the moment I will stick to the later history. The property, which was purchased in 1917 by Rufus Sibley to add to his already large estate in Spencer, was referred to as Sibley Hall, and was acquired by Leicester Junior College in 1952, to be used as a dormitory.¹¹Fiske, 32. In 1956 “Ghize Chevrolet moved into the barn at Sibley Hall. Four years later, Ghize Chevrolet bought the property and in 1961 leased Sibley Hall to Mr. and Mrs. Arthur H. Evans as a nursing home, which came to be known as Coventry Hall.”¹²Ibid. James Ghize (1902-1962) is listed in the 1950 Census as a “sales manager regional auto shop,” lived in Worcester, and was married to Glynis Pauline (Buzzell) Ghize (1920-1989).

It appears that the stone was located in front of the barn at Sibley Hall, which served, at least in the 1950s and into the 1960s, as a Chevrolet dealership. The barn burned at some point, presumably after Ghize’s death in 1962, as the “owner” of the stone at the time was listed as Glynes (sic) P. Ghize. Another Chevrolet dealership, Ragsdale Chevrolet, opened in 1972 in another building associated with Sibley Farm a mile down the road, which is consistent with the idea that, by then, Ghize Chevrolet was no longer operating at the barn at Sibley Hall (why would there be two Chevrolet dealers a mile apart in a lightly-populated part of Spencer?). The stone was then moved a few yards up the hill to roughly its current location, adjacent to the fence of what was, at the time, the Coventry Nursing Home, but which today is the Spencer Country Inn.

I found a Facebook Post Group called “People of Leicester” in which somebody asked “Does anybody remember when prior to Spencer Country Inn, there was a Ghize <sp> Chevrolet and after that it was a nursing home, Coventry Hall. I worked there until it closed.” Quite a few of those responding remember “Jimmy” Ghize fondly and talk about their memories of the nursing home, which operated through the 1970s on the location. It was not until the nursing home closed that the property was purchased by the Ekleberry family, who opened the Spencer Country Inn in 1982. Thus, the owners of the inn did not move the milestone marker to the property “to attract business,” because it was already in place in its current location when the owners acquired the building.

The chief difficulty, however, with the statement about the original location of milestone #57 is that Jaffe states that “we had to turn off the road to find” the milestone, implying that it was off the route of the road. In fact the driveway that passes in front (on the south side) of the building currently housing the Spencer Country Inn, is the original route of the Upper Boston Post Road. In other words, it is not the stone that has been moved off the road, it is the road that has been moved away from the stone. The map produced in 1830 by William Baldwin (see map above) clearly shows the road as it enters Spencer from Leicester as a straight road heading due west before curving slightly to the north just before it reached what is now Bond Street. The old road in Leicester even today heads due west as it reaches the border (with the exception of the final hundred yards, which was changed recently when a new section of Route 9 was put through the farmland at the Leicester/Spencer border), and the driveway of the Spencer Country Inn is clearly visible ahead as the natural continuation of the original road as one walks the road west (see photo at left).

This deviation from Main Street is the first of two major detours the original route of the Upper Boston Post Road takes away from the present road. Baldwin produced another detailed map of Spencer in 1834, which clearly shows changes in the course of the road from the map he had produced four years earlier. J.W. Temple, writing about the history of the town of Spencer in 1888, noted that in 1807, the “road was altered and improved, by straightening easterly and westerly…with more repairs in 1832 and in 1856.”¹³In D. Hamilton Hurd, History of Worcester County Vol I (Philadelphia: J.W. Lewis, 1889), 649. Spencer is in Volume I, Chapter LXXXV, pp. 631-667 by J.W. Temple. It seems likely that changes in the road in this area occurred as early as 1832, as the house that is now the Spencer Country Inn is shown on the south side of the road, and the curve of the road to the north of the inn that begins at the border with Leicester and continues to Bond Street is a prominent feature of the 1834 map (see below). The route of today’s road is similar to the route shown on Baldwin’s 1834 map, which indicates that the current road likely has changed little over the past 200 years. However, in the eighteenth century, when the milestones were placed along the roadside, the road would have passed directly through what is today the property of the Spencer Country Inn. I have shown the likely route of the original road on the map at the end of this entry (the red line) as well as the current route (the blue line).

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Inn-Keeping

A sign in front of the Spencer Country Inn reads: “Built in 1732 at the Old Post Road in Spencer. Called the Old Square Watson House, home to Robert Watson. Now property of the Spencer Country Inn.” It seems likely that at least some part of the original Watson homestead can be found in the current building, but it is unlikely to date to 1732. Oliver Watson, the first of the Watson family to settle in Spencer, “in 1740, purchased Lot 2 now owned by Ebenezer Howard and others,” according to James Draper in his History of Spencer.¹⁴Draper, 264. The division of the western half of the town of Leicester, the area which became the town of Spencer, occurred after the settlement of the eastern section of the town. Oliver Watson (1718-1804) grew up in Leicester, where his father Matthew Watson settled after arriving from Coleraine in Northern Ireland. At the age of twenty-two, the younger Watson purchased the large lot in what would soon become the town of Spencer, where he settled, married, and had at least eight children, including Robert Watson (1746-1806), who “had the homestead” briefly after the death of his father.¹⁵Draper, 265. According to the Watson Genealogy (see next reference) Oliver Watson was born on board the ship carrying his parents to Boston (see Watson Genealogy, 23). Another interesting story in the Genealogy relates that Matthew Watson was killed in 1720, just after settling in Leicester, when a tree he was felling fell on him. (See Watson Genealogy, 11).

The Watson property passed on to Robert Watson’s son Jeremiah Watson (1782-1856), according to the History and Genealogy of the Watson Family, descendants of Matthew Watson, who came to America in 1718.¹⁶ History and Genealogy of the Watson Family, descendants of Matthew Watson, who came to America in 1718. Compiled by Julia Draper (Watson) Bemis and Alonzo Amasa Bemis, DDS, Spencer, Mass., (Boston: Best & Co,. 1894), 65. The map from 1834 by William Baldwin (see map above), shows the property, just south of the now altered Upper Boston Post Road, as owned by “J Watson,” and measures it as 582 rods distance from the Congregational Meeting House. This building, which burned down in 2023 and is being rebuilt (a topic to which I will return in the next entry), is today 1.8 miles west along Main Street from the building today housing the Spencer Country Inn; 582 rods, for those who don’t generally use archaic measurements, is 1.8 miles (582 rods x 16.5 feet/rod=9603 feet divided by 5,280 feet/mile= 1.82 miles), which is consistent with the hypothesis that the Watson homestead is the same place as the Spencer Country Inn. It appears to be have stayed in the Watson family from the 1740s, when it was likely built, by Oliver Watson, until the death of Jeremiah Watson in 1856. Draper suggests that it was still the home of the father as late as 1800 (Oliver Watson died in 1804), as he refers to the “Deacon Oliver Watson” house, “now owned by Ebenezer Howard,” as one of the twenty-five that existed along the route of the Post Road in Spencer “previous to the present century,” in other words before 1800.¹⁷Draper, 73-74.

A map of Worcester County from 1857 by Henry Walling, shows the property as owned by “E.A. Howard,” which is consistent with Draper’s statement above referring to Ebenezer Howard as the owner (Draper published the second edition of his book in 1860). On the 1884 map of Spencer the house and surrounding thirty-acre property (as recorded on the map) is shown as owned by “I. Taft.” Taft is still shown as the owner on an 1898 map of Spencer (Plate 22 of the Atlas of Worcester County). Jeffrey Fiske, in his History of Spencer, Massachusetts, states that “in 1917, Rufus Sibley purchased the Israel Taft property, near the Leicester line, for his youngest son, John Russell Sibley….Thirty acres of land went with the building; however two acres of land and the Artic (sic) Polar Springs were excluded from the sale. The spring is located southeast of the present Spencer Country Inn.”¹⁸Fiske, 27. Fiske also states that “in 1901 it was referred to as the ‘Old Square Watson House’ and probably had changed little when purchased by the Sibleys.”¹⁹ibid.

According to Fiske, “John R. Sibley made extensive alterations to the property” which included a large expansion of the house (it is no longer “square”), the addition of modern conveniences, and the construction of a new barn to the south of the house. This is the barn which was later used by Ghize Chevrolet. A newer barn was subsequently put up after the original barn burned and can be seen in the photograph above showing the old road as seen from Leicester.²⁰ibid. Hence the building we see today is a “modernized” version of the original Watson homestead, designed and reconstructed around 1920, a period in which Neo-Colonial-style architecture was at its peak of popularity, hence the “old” look of the building, which is mostly a look created in the 1920s.

Apart the fact that the Spencer Country Inn is situated in a lovely location with views across the fields, particularly from the elegant gazebo across from the house (unsurprisingly, the Inn is frequently used for weddings), there is one more curiosity on the property that makes it worth idling here for a few more minutes. At the back end of the parking lot, overlooking the driving range, sits an old Worcester Lunch Car Company diner propped up on cinder blocks. This particular diner was once located at 97 Main Street in the center of Spencer and was called the Kenwood Diner (Worcester Lunch Car #713).²¹Larry Cultrera, Classic Diners of Massachusetts (Charleston: History Press, 2011), 92. The diner was moved here from its original location in 2022 in order to allow the controversial construction of a CVS pharmacy in the center of the Spencer Town Center Historic District, a subject to which I will return in a future entry.

Kenwood Diner was purchased in 1995 by Dave Ekleberry, a “town selectman and longtime airline pilot” who died the following year, at the age of 61. Ekleberry and his wife Phyllis had previously purchased the Spencer Country Inn in 1981 and “renovated the building, part of the old Sibley Farm, which was built in 1740 and had recently been a nursing home. He combined major modernization and renovation with preservation of the original Colonial decor. In 1984 he built an addition to the inn,” according to his obituary in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette. Phyllis Ekleberry “put her heart and soul into (the Spencer Country Inn) for over 40 years,” until her recent death in 2025. A son, Bill Ekleberry, runs auctions from the barn, and a daughter, Amy Perro, still manages operations at the Inn, but the future of the diner is still unknown, as it sits forlornly awaiting a rebirth like so many of its sibling diners moved from their original location to a new spot, one of the distinct advantages of the Worcester Lunch Car Company diners.

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Into the Gutter

After my visit to the Spencer Country Inn I continue my walk along the route of the Old Post Road, which continues across a field on the property of the inn, descending to rejoin Main Street/ Route 9 about a quarter of a mile after leaving Main Street at Polar Spring Road. The short walk, though scenic, does not offer any historical artifacts. On the other hand, neither does the quarter-mile walk along Main Street/ Route 9 from the border to the junction of Bond Street, an area referred to as “Taft’s Corner” in the nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century local history books. One of the Tafts was Israel Taft, who owned the property that is now the Spencer Country Inn, as described above. Israel Taft is listed in the 1860 Census as a near neighbor of Edward Proctor, which indicates he had already taken over the property from Ebenezer Howard. Taft died in 1896 and is buried in Worcester, where his daughter lived after her marriage. Taft’s wife Alice died in 1906, so who Rufus Sibley purchased the property from in 1917 is unclear.

Israel Taft had a brother, Chandler Taft, who was also a farmer and owned the property across the road from the Spencer Country Inn, at the northwest corner of Bond Street and Main Street. Chandler Taft died in 1904, and in 1918 “the Sibleys bought the so-called Chandler Taft farm of sixty-five acres. This farm was located on Route 9 on the west corner of Bond Street.”²²Fiske, 27. According to Fiske the house was still standing when the book was published in 1990, but today a large veterinary clinic sits on the corner where the old house, shown on the 1898 map above, was once located. One of Draper’s “twenty-five houses” that existed along the road around 1800 was that of Nathaniel Loring, “near to that of Lewis Bergeron.”²³Draper, 74. There is an “L. Burgeson” on the northwest corner of Bond and Main Street on Walling’s 1857 map, but on the 1870 map of the area the property is now that of Chandler Taft. J.W. Temple, writing in 1888, claims that eight of Draper’s twenty-five buildings along the Upper Boston Post Road still existed at the time; although Israel Taft’s house (the Watson homestead/Spencer Country Inn) is listed as one of the eight surviving houses, the Loring/ Bergeron/Chandler Taft house is not listed, so it is likely that any house that existed in the nineteenth century was of more recent construction.²⁴Hurd, 667. Regardless, there is neither a house from the eighteenth, nineteenth, or even twentieth century on “Taft’s Corner” today.

The section of the road from Bond Street to Donnelly Road was once called Hemlock Gutter, described by James Draper in 1860 as “a ravine which crosses the great post road east of the house of Henry Eames, and was formerly a terror to the teamster, being difficult to pass; but now rendered perfectly safe and easy for the passage of all kinds of carriages.”²⁵Draper, 119. The house of Henry Eames can be seen on Baldwin’s 1834 map above, on the northeast corner of Donnelly Road. On the Sibley Farms and Burncoat Pond Trail map there is a stream labelled Burncoat Brook that runs south from Main Street between Bond Street and Donnelly Road through the conservation land, feeding eventually into Burncoat Pond which, as a reminder, is all part of the French River watershed. Although the brook is not shown on the 1830 or the 1834 map it is shown on Walling’s 1857 map of the area, as well as on the 1870 and 1898 maps of the area.

The elevation of the road at the lowest point, about halfway between Bond Street and Donnelly Road, where a culvert carries Burncoat Brook under the road, is about 960 feet above sea level, which is fifty feet lower than the elevation at Taft’s Corner, and is more than eighty feet lower than the milestone sitting in front of the Spencer Country Inn (1043 feet above sea level). Even today there is marshy land on both sides of the road, before the road goes uphill again to reach Proctor’s Corner, the intersection of Donnelly Road and Main Street, a half-mile from the border with Leicester. A later historian of Spencer, Henry Tower provides a vivid description, echoing Draper, of traveling east along the original road: “The present road…came out near the house of Edward Proctor, thence down through ‘Hemlock Gutter,’ and in a direct line over the hill to the Leicester line. This gutter was a terror to teamsters, as it was very difficult to pass at any season of the year. The difference between this primitive road and the highway of today is, that the hills have been cut down, the valleys filled and the stones and stumps removed, making traveling by wheel now comparatively easy.”²⁶Henry M. Tower, Historical Sketches Relating to Spencer, Massachusetts. Four Volumes. (W. J. Heffernan, Spencer Leader Printer, 1901-1909), Volume 2, 120. It is easy to imagine that this was once a difficult area to negotiate with a horse and wagon, particularly during “mud season” in New England.

Standing at “Proctor’s Corner” looking west, it is also not difficult to understand why the original route of the Upper Boston Post Road deviated to the south from today’s road at this point and headed uphill through the land that is now part of the Sibley Farm conservation land. Main Street/Route 9 west of Donnelly Road today crosses directly over a low-lying marshy area, bifurcating a pond whose waters presumably pass under the road. The road had clearly been altered into something like its current configuration by 1857, as the 1857 map, the 1870 map, the 1884 map, and the 1898 map of the area all show the road crossing what is clearly a pond just west of the house of Edward Proctor.

In contrast, Baldwin’s map of 1830 (see above) shows the road taking a sharp turn to the south at the junction of what is today Donnelly Road before turning southwest then northwest and finally curving up to the north just before the intersection with today’s Paxton Road. Amazingly, most of the route of this old road can still be followed, as I described above, by following the “Old Boston Post Road Trail” through the adjacent Sibley Farm conservation land. Although the trail does not eventually reconnect with the main road today further west, at least I can follow a pleasant trail uphill across open fields for a few minutes before backtracking to resume my walk along the modern route of the Upper Boston Post Road.

The “Old Boston Post Road Trail” passes along slightly higher ground (the old road is consistently about twenty to thirty feet above the new road until the two reconnect near 350 Main Street) to the south of the wetlands through which the current road passes. The path heads uphill before ending at the junction with the “Snowbirds Trail,” but it is clear that, although the official trail ends, the old road clearly continued west through the adjacent field behind the house on the hill at 358 Main Street. I head downhill across the field and reach the edge of an apartment complex at 350 Main Street. At the bottom of the field, along the edge of Main Street/Route 9, is a drainage pond where a pair of wood ducks try to evade my gaze by swimming behind the trunks of some submerged saplings. I could crash through the bramble and cross through the property at 350 Main Street to regain the main road but decide instead to retrace my steps to Proctor’s Corner and continue along the modern road.

The house of Edward Proctor, for whom Proctor’s Corner, the intersection of Donnelly Road and Main Street, is named, was one of Draper’s “twenty-five buildings” that lined the Upper Boston Post Road in Spencer before 1800. J.W. Temple, writing in 1888, assessed the state of these houses at the time: “Of the twenty-five buildings (exclusive of barns) located upon the Great Post Road between Brookfield and Leicester lines in 1800, eight were standing in 1888, six of them but little, if any, changed from their original appearance and condition outwardly. These are the Pope Mansion, Mason House, Emerson Shepherd’s, Aaron Watson’s, Edward Proctor’s, and Israel Taft’s.”²⁷Hurd, 667. The first three of these buildings will be discussed in future entries on the town of Spencer, but the final three were all located along the route of this section of the Upper Boston Post Road in eastern Spencer. The Taft house has been discussed, and the Aaron Watson house will be discussed shortly. The Edward Proctor house is listed in the MACRIS records (SPE-1), which states that the house was occupied by the Proctor family from at least 1856 to 1898, and which supplies a photograph of the c.1800 house. The report also describes the road through the Proctor’s Corner area as “a heavily traveled thoroughfare, although the land is still sparsely developed.” Unfortunately, a handwritten note at the top of the report also states that the house was “DEMOLISHED Ca. ’84,” a statement which is evidently accurate as I stand in the place where the house is meant to be located, on the northwest corner of Donnelly Road and Main Street, and am confronted instead with a large dirt parking lot fronting two ramshackle buildings, a sign advertising the Village Garden Center in front of the first, and a second sign advertising Hilltop Auto Sales in front of the adjacent building.

The northeast corner of Donnelly Road and Main Street, where the Eames house stood as recently as 1990– Jeffrey Fiske states in his book that “Eames lived in the house that still stands on the east corner of Donnelly Road and Route 9”– today is occupied by a modern building housing Barnstorm Cycles and Jeeps, according to the sign in front.²⁸Fiske, 26. There is a also a large construction equipment supplier directly opposite, on the south side of Main Street, and a wire and cable supply company just east of the old Eames house site. Although the Sibley Farm conversation land has been preserved, Proctor’s Corner can no longer be described as “sparsely developed.” Meanwhile, the score so far of the surviving six or eight houses in 1888 of the original “twenty-five” is: Taft/Watson house–maybe, Proctor house–no. Does the Aaron Watson house still exist? We will soon find out. The survival rate of these and other houses described by Fiske or those recorded in the MACRIS listings is very poor. No wonder the walk along Main Street seemed so unpromising when I first visited.

A Lot of Farm

When Oliver Watson purchased Lot #2 in what would become Spencer in 1740, he acquired a very large piece of property. Each allocated lot was about a mile in length and 125 rods in width, roughly 250 acres of land.²⁹This is about the size of the Arnold Arboretum, for example. 125 rods is .39 mi in length, so 1 mile x .39 miles = 0.39 mi². There are 640 acres in 1 mi², so 640 x 0.39 mi² = 250 (249.6) acres. A map showing the lots can be found in the preface to Draper’s History of Spencer. Watson’s lot started at the border and continued west for a mile on both sides of the Upper Boston Post Road. Essentially the entirety of the walk described in this entry passes through what was once the Watson lot. Pieces of the property were sold off over the years or split between children. Oliver Watson’s daughter Abigail (1759-1820), for instance, married Reuben Whittemore (1754-1832), and their property eventually became the Edward Proctor estate.³⁰Draper, 73. Bemis, Genealogy, 25. Ultimately the original Watson homestead was reduced to the 28-acre property purchased for John Russell Sibley in 1917 from the Israel Taft estate. The Sibleys also purchased the 65-acre property of Israel Taft’s brother Chandler Taft in 1918 and acquired the Proctor estate.

As I mentioned earlier, most of this walk passes through property that was once part of Sibley farm. Rufus Sibley, consciously or not, essentially recreated Watson’s original Lot #2. The walk west from the border is not only a walk through the original Watson lot, it is also a walk backwards in time through the various purchases made by Sibley until this entry ends at Sibley’s Corner, where the headquarters of Sibley farm were once located. Rufus Sibley had been acquiring property for decades prior to the acquisition of the property of the Taft brothers, including the estate of Edward Proctor. Jeffrey Fiske tells us that, “In 1899 at an auction of the Proctor estate, Sibley added 160 acres to the farm. The Proctor farmhouse, located at the west corner of Donnelly Road and Route 9, had a large barn across the street. Sibley bought all the land and buildings on the south side of the highway…Sibley now owned close to a square mile of real estate.”³¹Fiske, 26. The Old Boston Post Road Trail, described above, passes through the land acquired in the Proctor estate purchase.

The main road continues across the wetlands described above and continues slowly uphill through a mostly low-lying wooded area for about a third of a mile before I reach the pond at the base of the field I crossed earlier, and the wood ducks once again try to hide from me as I pass to the north of the pond to reach the junction of the old road and the modern road near the apartment complex across the street from the Sunoco and the Dunkin Donuts at 353 Main Street. The ducks likely don’t realize it and most people driving along the road would fail to notice as there are no signs announcing it, but the junction also marks the final transition from the French River watershed to the Quaboag River watershed. Au revoir, French River watershed and its south-flowing water, as the road now follows the water flowing west to the Connecticut River. The mid-state “hump” has been crossed and the Upper Boston Post Road has reached a watershed moment.

The third of the 1888 “survivors” along this section of the Upper Boston Post Road is the only house shown between Donnelly Road and Paxton Road on maps of 1834, 1857, 1870, 1884, and 1898. On the 1834 map it is the house of J. Bigelow, but on all subsequent maps it is the house of Aaron Watson, who lived somewhere near the junction of the old road and the new road, as Tower describes the original route of the old road “from the house of Aaron Watson it was south of the present road and came out at the house of Edward Proctor.”³²Tower, Volume 2, 120. Aaron Watson (1814-1896) was the great-grandson of Oliver Watson. An older-looking house at 349 Main Street is certainly a candidate, but I have found no record of the house in any of the sources I have consulted. Final score of the “survivors” along this section of the Upper Boston Post Road: 2 maybes and a no. Not a great result.

Whether or not the house at 349 Main Street is a survivor from the eighteenth century, there is certainly another eighteenth-century survivor two hundred yards ahead. Hidden behind a telephone pole between 325 and 327 Main Street is another milestone, the 58 milestone (SPE.906, owner listed as “Commonwealth of Massachusetts”), just about a mile from the 57 milestone encountered in front of the Spencer Country Inn. This particular stone is a little lighter in tone than milestone #57, described as “a pink color” by the Gages in their book on the milestones of Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire.³³Gage and Gage, 82. Slightly more worn than the previous milestone, the words “58 Mile From Boston” can still be made out on the facade, which is also accompanied by a wooden “Franklin Marker” sign.

The milestone sits directly across the street from the parking lot for Woody’s Autobody and Emerald Auto Sales, which is housed in one of the buildings originally built here for the operations of Sibley Farm. Jeffrey Fiske, whose History of Spencer, Massachusetts 1875-1975 covers the history of the farm in extensive detail, tells us that “the main farm buildings for Sibley Farms were located across the street from Paxton Road. The group of buildings on Main Street, just east of David Prouty High School and now used for commercial purposes, were the nucleus of a farm that extended from Greenville Street on the west, to the Leicester line on the east. Most of the farm was on the south side of the road.”³⁴Fiske, 24.

At its peak the land acquired by Rufus Sibley for his estate far outstripped the original Watson lot in size. Henry Tower, writing in 1902, before Sibley acquired the Taft properties, noted that “the town of Spencer contains 21,394 acres of land, of which amount William Wilson last year owned 910 acres, or one-twenty-fourth of the whole. George Wilson had 466 acres and Rufus Sibley 443 acres, each holding about one-fiftieth of the town’s area.”³⁵Tower, Volume 2, 124. Most of the Wilson properties are not directly on the Upper Boston Post Road, but Sibley Farm is intimately connected to the route of the Upper Boston Post Road as we have seen, with sections of the original road running directly through fields where Sibley’s extensive dairy herd once grazed.

Tower provides a long biography of local boy made good Rufus Sibley (1841-1928) in his Historical Sketches Relating to Spencer, Massachusetts. After a brief early period teaching in Spencer and working as a clerk and bookkeeper for Grout, Prouty, and Co., Sibley moved to Boston to work as a bookkeeper for a store there for three more years. In 1868 he formed a partnership, scouted locations, and decided to open a manufacturing and retailing company in Rochester, New York, initially called the Boston Store but shortly changed to the names of the partners, Sibley, Lindsay, and Curr. The business was very successful and the company expanded into new markets as far west as Minneapolis, Minnesota. At one point the department store in Rochester was the largest between New York and Chicago. Sibley became an important figure in the cultural and financial circles of Rochester and maintained his primary residence there until his death in 1928.³⁶Tower, Volume 2, 129-131. Fiske, 31. He is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester.

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Sibley purchased Moose Hill Farm in his hometown of Spencer in 1887 as a summer house. Fiske cheekily writes that, “the farm began as a means of restoring health to its founder, Rufus Adams Sibley, who was suffering from the ill effects of making a great deal of money.”³⁷Fiske, 24. The farmhouse is located at 321 Main Street. The MACRIS report (SPE.8) claims that the house was built by William Bemis, circa 1750, but neither Draper nor Tower mention it as one of the twenty-five houses from before 1800 along the Upper Boston Post Road. There is a house in the location on Baldwin’s 1834 map owned by “W. Bemis,” and by 1857 a house at the same location, on the northwest corner of Paxton Road (called Wire Village Road in the nineteenth century) and Main Street, is shown as owned by “J. Green.” Tower mentions that Josiah Green, Jr. “married Sarah Elizabeth Nichols. They at once commenced housekeeping in what is now the Moose Hill Farm house, corner of Main Street and Wire Village Road, owned by Rufus A. Sibley, proprietor of Moose Hill Farm.”³⁸Tower, Volume 3, 215. The house was still owned by “J. Green” on both the 1870 and the 1884 map, but by 1898 the words “MOOSE HILL FARM” were written in bold right across Main Street at Sibley’s Corner, and R.A. Sibley was now listed as the owner (see maps above).

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In 1898 Sibley began work on a much bigger house, a fifty-two room mansion on the hill across the street for which the farm was named.³⁹Fiske, 24-32 contains a detailed discussion of Sibley Farm. Moose Hill mansion served as Sibley’s summer home, and he spent much of his free time acquiring the surrounding land and breeding Jersey cows. In 1918 Rufus Sibley retired from running the farm and turned over management to his son John R. Sibley, who had acquired what is now the Spencer Country Inn the previous year. The merger of the two properties resulted in the name of the farm changing from Moose Hill to Sibley Farm. John Sibley expanded operations and built a modern dairy processing facility in 1931. The building still stands today, as do many of the buildings associated with Sibley Farm.

Most of the businesses in the commercial area opposite Paxton Road along Main Street operate out of buildings leftover from Sibley Farm. The most obvious is the large red building set back from the road at 322 Main Street, which formerly served as a dairy production facility and today houses Sheena’s Salon and Spa. Other buildings flanking the central building are also relics from Sibley farm, including the one on the right housing the Goods Bakery and the one on the left housing Woody’s Autobody and Collision Center and Emerald Auto Sales. Incidentally this site was formerly the location of Ragsdale Chevrolet, mentioned earlier in the entry.

The location of the mansion on top of Moose Hill is now the location of the David Prouty High School athletic fields and a large water tower. The hill is also the dividing line between the French River Watershed and the Quaboag River watershed, and is easily visible from Main Street looming up over the high school and the commercial buildings that once comprised the dairy operations of Sibley Farm, a last reminder of the four miles of the Upper Boston Post Road through Leicester and the first mile in Spencer which passed through the watershed. The building remained unoccupied after Rufus Sibley’s death, and a hurricane in 1938 did lasting damage to the exposed building, 1075 feet above sea level and nearly one hundred feet above the surrounding fields and the Upper Boston Post Road over which it once loomed, and the building was taken down a short time later.

The farm continued selling milk until 1963, when the dairy herd was sold at auction. John Sibley died in 1965, and in the same year, forty acres of land were purchased for the David Prouty Regional High School. Also in 1965, four hundred acres were purchased by Trio Realty, while one hundred acres were donated to the Massachusetts Audubon Society.⁴⁰Fiske, 32. A large condominium development and a strip mall along Route 9 were planned for the farm, but the 2008 Recession caused the plans to fall through. A coalition of environmental groups protected the land, according to the stewards of the property, Common Ground Land Trust (CGLT): “Sibley Farm in Spencer was CGLT’s first major project as a land trust, working with Greater Worcester Land Trust (GWLT), Mass Audubon, and the Town of Spencer to raise $2.9 million to permanently protect 351 acres of land between E. Main St/Route 9 and Greenville Street. In 2007, developers had permits to build a strip mall along Route 9 and condominiums on the remaining part of the properties once known as Sibley Farm and Seven Springs Farm. However, the land was foreclosed after the 2008 economic crash, and the bank (DCU) offered the land for sale at a vastly reduced price to a conservation buyer. The fundraising effort allowed Mass Audubon to purchase the property, retaining about 25 acres to build a parking area for their abutting Burncoat Pond Sanctuary, and then resell the remaining 325 acres to Greater Worcester Land Trust, with deed restrictions granted to CGLT and the Town of Spencer.  81 acres of farm fields along Route 9 are protected by an Agricultural Preservation Restriction (APR), meaning that those acres are permanently restricted to commercial agricultural use only. The non-APR 271 acres of Sibley Farm are protected by a Conservation Restriction (CR) which permanently restricts development on the property. As owner of this CR, CGLT is responsible for monitoring the non-APR acreage and its boundaries each year, and our members actively volunteer for trail projects and invasive weed management projects organized by GWLT.”

Thank God!!

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At David Prouty High School the sidewalk thankfully reappears after an absence of more than three miles. No more struggling with traffic and worrying about curves ahead in the road. The gap between buildings diminishes, and the area before me is lined with houses as the road slowly begins a long climb uphill. The farmland is behind me for the next few miles as I enter the Spencer Center Historic District. I reach the intersection with Greenville Street, which leads south to the entrance of the Burncoat Pond Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary. The historic district can wait. I don’t doubt that I will come back so, rather than continue along the Upper Boston Post Road, I decide to turn back and spend the rest of the day meandering the trails through fields and woodland. One more for the road, as the song says…

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This entry is dedicated to local historian Jeffrey H. Fiske (1940-2025), who died a few months before I began seriously researching this entry. I first began my research on the route of the Upper Boston Post Road in Spencer in November 2024 and perused his book on Spencer with interest at the time. However, although I always intended to reach out to him, I was busy working on my entries for the town of Leicester. I wish I had the opportunity to make his acquaintance as I am sure we would have had a lot to talk about. Not only did Fiske, a Spencer native, a David Prouty High School graduate, and a popular long-time teacher at David Prouty Junior High School, write the History of Spencer 1875-1975, but he also wrote a History of the North Brookfield Church and A History of West Brookfield, both resources I have looked at and will return to in my research of the towns along the Upper Boston Post Road, as well a history of Shays’s Rebellion in the nearby town of New Braintree, where he was a long-time resident. Hopefully, somebody will pick up one of his books as a result of reading this entry to learn far more about Spencer and the other towns about which he wrote than these essays can provide. I certainly learned a lot from his research, and for that I am grateful to him. Any errors in this entry are mine alone. I am sure Jeff Fiske would have corrected them.

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Distance traveled in this entry along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road: 1.3 miles.

Total Distance traveled thus far along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road from Worcester Courthouse to Springfield “Meeting House” (nine entries): 10.9 miles.

Total Distance traveled along the original route of the road from the Old State House in Boston for this project: 57.7 miles.

Total Distance covered for all the walks described in Boston Rambles: 119.2 miles.