Spencer, Massachusetts, #2.

A Faithful Walk through the Interior

Part Two– Institutional Spencer

Upper Boston Post Road #24 (UBPR #24)

Institution (noun):

1. a : an established organization or corporation (such as a bank or university) especially of a public character.

b : a facility or establishment in which people (such as the sick or needy) live and receive care typically in a confined setting and often without individual consent.

c : a significant practice, relationship, or organization in a society or culture.

2. Establishment.

“Institution.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/institution. Accessed 28 May, 2026.

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Introduction.

The foundational institution of every town along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road and, indeed, every town in New England, was the meeting house. The traditional method of establishing towns in Massachusetts and other New England colonies typically began with a request by members living at the far reaches of the territory of a particular town to form a new congregation. Such was the case in Spencer, which was originally part of the town of Leicester. Another early institution in almost every town was the tavern, which not only served travelers passing through town along the road, but also frequently served as post office, meeting space, and other functions that could not be accommodated by the meeting house. In the nineteenth century, as the population grew and as more and different religious groups formed in towns, buildings designed specifically for the purposes of town business became a necessity and the town hall was added to the list of institutional buildings. Schools were important in New England towns from their earliest settlement, but it was not until the nineteenth century that high schools became a requirement in most towns in Massachusetts. As towns like Spencer prospered because of the numerous factories that were established in the nineteenth century, banks became a necessary addition to the institutional landscape. Some of the profits were diverted to the betterment of the town and its citizens, and the high school, the public library, and the local town park in Spencer were all established with donations from some of the wealthy businessmen who lived in the solidly built houses that still line Main Street and the nearby streets in the center of town. This entry is a description of a walk through “Institutional Spencer,” a short walk along Main Street, the route of the Upper Boston Post Road, through the center of Spencer. Along this short stretch of the road (approximately one mile) are located all of the aforementioned institutions. This entry traces the origins of these buildings alongside the origins of the town of Spencer itself.

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Expanding The Center.

57.7 miles from the Old State House in Boston along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road.

The house at 301 Main Street in Spencer (SPE.147 in MACRIS entry SPE.A, more about this below) was built circa 1850 and can be seen on Henry Walling’s 1857 map of Spencer and on the 1870 map of the area produced by F.W. Beers, in his Atlas of Worcester County (pages 60-61, see below), as the house of George Bemis 2nd (1818-1910). This is one of the last houses included on the eastern edge of the detailed nineteenth-century maps of the center of Spencer; it is the last house shown along Main Street on the detailed maps of Spencer Center from 1884 and from 1898 (owned by George Wilson on those maps). The previous entry followed the route of the Upper Boston Post Road in the eastern part of Spencer, from the border with Leicester to this spot a little west of Paxton Road, directly across the street from David Prouty High School, through an area that historically was mostly farmland on the edge of town. This entry follows the road through the more developed area leading into the center of Spencer. Today and historically, the mile or so west from this point to the center of town at the intersection of Pleasant Street and Main Street and the roughly three-quarters of a mile west from the town center at the Pleasant and Main Street intersection to the intersection of West Main Street with Olde Main Street has been the population center of Spencer. The detailed nineteenth-century maps of Spencer Center are remarkably similar to the area zoned as “village residential” on the official zoning map of the Town of Spencer.¹The zoning map also shows the few blocks surrounding the intersection of Main Street and Pleasant Street as “Town Center Mixed Use.” The entire remaining length of Main Street that is not in one of the above zones (i.e. the eastern and western sections of the road) is zoned “commercial,” with the exception of a few small sections zoned “industrial.” A ring of “suburban residential” zoning surrounds the “village residential” zone, and the vast remaining bulk of the town to the north and the south of the center (at least 80% of the total area of Spencer) is zoned “rural residential.” No part of the Upper Boston Post Road is located in this last zone.

The town of Spencer is comprised of two census tracts: the first, Census tract 7262, is the 2.1 square-mile area that comprises the central “village” of the town, about 6% of the total area of Spencer. This tract has a population of 5,661 people, almost half (47%) of the town’s estimated 12,008 residents (American Community Survey 2024-25, five-year estimate), with a density of 2,684 residents/mile². Census tract 7261, which surrounds the central tract and comprises the remaining 30.7 square miles (94%) of the 32.8 mi² of the town of Spencer, has 6,347 residents and a population density of 207 residents/mile², one-tenth the population density of the central tract. The central tract (7262) extends from Olde Main Street in the west almost to Paxton Road in the east along Main Street, and extends north and south from Main Street a similar distance from the center. In other words, any way you look at it, the center of Spencer begins somewhere around 301 Main Street in the east of town and ends where the old road splits from the newer road (today’s West Main Street, which appears on maps by 1870) in the western part of Spencer.

This entry will follow the road from 301 Main Street into the center, stopping at Spencer Memorial Town Hall, a distance of 0.9 miles. The next entry will continue along Main Street through the center to the junction with Olde Main Street, a distance of 0.8 miles. The fourth and final entry of my walk through the town of Spencer will start at the junction of Olde Main Street and West Main Street and follow the old road to the western border of the town of Spencer with East Brookfield, a distance of 1.5 miles, out of the center just as the first entry passed from the eastern border of the town of Spencer with Leicester to the center.

The Massachusetts Cultural Resource Information System (MACRIS) website keeps a record of houses, neighborhoods, and cultural artifacts that are deemed to be of historical, cultural, or architectural significance for each town in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. All of Main Street in Spencer, from the East Brookfield line in the west to the border with Leicester in the east, is part of area SPE.A, which was designated as significant in the report (written in 1984) because “Main Street through Spencer follows essentially the route of the Great Post Road which was established here by 1625. The road has served as a major transportation route over the last three-plus centuries. The town center of Spencer grew up around it …[T]he architecture along Main Street reflects the evolution of Spencer from an agricultural community to a small, but prosperous manufacturing town in the 19th century.” The report also notes the change along the road in the area around 301 Main Street, which is just west of Lake Whittemore Drive: “West of Lake Whittemore Drive buildings become increasingly dense.” There are more detailed reports, with specifics on hundreds of houses in the more developed areas west of this house, a little closer to town (SPE.K, SPE.M, SPE.N, and SPE.O, to name a few, a subject to which I will return shortly). Only a few houses, including the house at 301 Main Street, are listed along the mile-and-a-half of Main Street from Greenville Street east to the border with Leicester in the Main Street report that covers this area (SPE.A), and many of these houses have disappeared since the report was first produced in the 1980s, as I discussed in the previous entry.

The house at 301 Main Street (SPE.147 in the SPE.A report on MACRIS) replaced a much older house that had existed for at least a century on the same property. This older house was one of the earliest houses in Spencer. According to James Draper, in his History of Spencer, Massachusetts, the earliest settler was Nathaniel Cunningham, “a wealthy merchant of Boston, [who] purchased lots 24 and 36 containing 500 acres, and erected the large house owned by George Bemis 2d, lately destroyed by fire. This house was the third built on the great post road.”²James Draper, History of Spencer, Massachusetts From Its Earliest Settlement To The Year 1860 (Worcester: Henry J. Howland, 1860), 183. These two lots comprise about two-thirds of the walk described in this entry, and include the Old Spencer Cemetery and the Congregational Meeting House, as Cunningham “conveyed [in 1740] two acres of land to the inhabitants of Spencer, for the accommodation of a meeting house, and for other parochial and municipal purposes, more than half of which was appropriated for a place to bury their dead.”³Draper, 125. In 1760 “Mr. Jeremiah Whittemore purchased 200 acres of the eastern part, now owned by Joseph Green, Josiah Green jun., Paul Woolson, George Bemis 2d, and others.”⁴Draper, 183. Josiah Green, Jr. owned the house just east of 301 Main Street, at 321 Main Street, which was originally owned by Jeremiah Whittemore, Jr. and was later purchased by Rufus Sibley in 1887, shortly after Green’s death. This property was the nucleus of what became Sibley Farm, as discussed in the previous entry. On William Baldwin’s 1834 map of the town of Spencer, these are the only two houses (owned at the time respectively by “L. Smith” and “W. Bemis”) shown on the map from Paxton Road to Greenville Street (see map below).

Jeremiah Whittemore (1723-1803) “fitted up the large mansion house built by Nathaniel Cunningham, for a tavern, and personally superintended the same as a public house, for forty-five years.”⁵Draper, 270. The tavern appears in Isiah Thomas’s Almanack for 1785, 6 miles from Swan’s in Leicester and 2 miles from Lathrop’s in Leicester (and 59 miles from the Old State House in Boston); both are discussed in the entries on Leicester. Isaac Bickerstaff’s Boston Almanack, or Federal Calendar, for 1789 also mentions Whittemore in Spencer, but claimed it was 7 miles from Taft’s in Leicester and 62 miles from Boston, which seems unlikely; as I have stated before, the math rarely adds up on the various tavern lists and varies so much from almanac to almanac that I am convinced that, if two almanacs have matching entries, one likely copied from the other, as not only are the same mathematical errors repeated, but the same variant spellings of names also occur, always in tandem! Bickerstaff gets it a little closer in the 1791 edition of his Boston Genuine Almanack, with “Whitmore’s” in Spencer 4 miles from Swan’s in Leicester (and 60.5 miles from Boston). Nathanael Low, in his Almanack for 1800, puts Jenks and “Whitmore’s” near each other in Spencer Center, at a distance of 60 miles from Boston. In 1802 Thomas again mentions Whittemore, but mistakenly places the tavern in Leicester.⁶The almanacs are all found at this website from Tufts University. It is illustrative to discover that the eighteenth-century versions of Google Maps were often as unreliable as modern guidebooks and map apps. The house at 301 Main Street is located one thousand feet west of the 58 milestone (which is located between 325 and 327 Main Street, as discussed in the previous entry), and is located 57.7 miles from the Old State House, according to my calculations, along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road as it was laid out in the eighteenth century. Allowing for rounding, the old Whittemore Tavern would have been located 58 miles from Boston, give or take a few tenths of a mile.

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In the 1880s this was still the “edge” of town. Directly across the street is David Prouty High School, which is built upon land that was once part of Sibley Farm (discussed in the previous entry). On the 1870 map of the area there are only six buildings located on Main Street between Paxton Road and Greenville Street, a distance of 0.3 miles, and the property of each extends a long way back from the road, as most of the land was farmed. Today this same area is occupied by more than a dozen houses along Main Street, a small commercial center in some of the old Sibley Farm buildings, David Prouty High School (which serves Spencer and neighboring East Brookfield), a Dairy Queen, a Dippin’ Donuts (a local franchise), a dentist office, and, amazingly, a small parcel of undeveloped land. There are also three long drives leading north from Main Street almost to Lake Whittemore (formerly called Moose Pond, but now-named for the early settler and tavern keeper) along which are dozens of houses built in recent decades. If this area was the edge of town a century ago, it is certainly a developed part of Spencer center today.

Despite the fact that this area of Spencer is part of the more densely-populated “village residential” zone of Spencer Center, it is no urban landscape by any means. The density of the central census tract, at well under 3,000 (2,684) inhabitants per square mile, is five times lower than the leafy neighborhood in Boston where I live, a neighborhood which will never be mistaken for the densely-crowded urban hellscape cities are often portrayed as these days. There are still barns on some of the properties I pass as I make my way along Main Street in Spencer into the center of town, and many of the houses along the road for the next few hundred yards were built in the nineteenth century and occupied, according to census reports from the late-nineteenth century, by owners who listed “farmer” as their principal occupation. George Bemis 2nd moved a few hundred yards west along Main Street (to 254 Main Street) sometime after 1870, but continued to list his occupation as farmer on the Census prior to 1900 (when he was 82 years-old).

Ironically, farming as an occupation in Spencer had long been in decline when Rufus Sibley became one of the biggest landowners in the area, buying up most of the property around the house at 301 Main Street to create Sibley Farm, which operated as a dairy farm into the 1960s. Sibley, despite the earnest attempts by local historians to paint him as a modern farmer, was primarily a department store magnate who lived most of his life in Rochester, New York, and who summered in Spencer, as did his son John Russell Sibley, who took over the farm in 1918. Bucolic and glamorous as it looks in the photographs, the dairy operations at Sibley farms were in many ways a “Potemkin” farm, a farm which appeared to be a continuation of a centuries-old farming tradition in this part of Spencer, but which in reality was a summer hobby of a rich man, which ended as soon as the owner decided to stop. The farmers who once lived off the land died one by one and their land was sold to Sibley. When the younger Sibley ended the project, some of the land ended up being preserved and the rest is slowly being developed. There are no farms in this part of Spencer anymore. With the exception of some of the Sibley Farm preserved land (see the previous entry), almost all of the former farmland along Main Street/Route 9 in this part of Spencer is zoned for commercial development.

Across the street from the house at 301 Main Street, on what was once part of Sibley Farm, is David Prouty High School, which was relocated here in the 1960s from its former location further west along Main Street (more about the original high school building at 195 Main Street later). A modern building at the current location is being erected to replace the building that was opened here in the 1960s. Just west of David Prouty High School, “a cluster of smaller early Victorian houses with three-bay gabled fronts, probably dating from between 1860 and 1877, stand on the south side of the road east of Greenville road,” according to the historic report (SPE.A). One of these, a yellow Greek-Revival-style house with a separate barn (now a two-car garage) at 288 Main Street, is the house (built c. 1860) shown on the 1870 map (above) as belonging to “R. Bisco.” It appears on the 1884 map as the house of Roswell Bisco and on the 1898 map as the “estate of Roswell Bisco.” Roswell Bisco (1813-1896) is listed in the 1880 Census as a “farmer.” Today the house is sandwiched between the Dippin’ Donuts and the offices of Spencer Family Dental. Needless to say, there is no farm.

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Different Shades of Green

The idea that Spencer and other towns in central Massachusetts have always been bucolic farming communities was never entirely true. Although large tracts of land in Spencer and other towns were dedicated to farming, most of the money in the town was generated by the manufacture of goods, at first on a small scale, but rapidly thereafter on an industrial scale, especially the production of boots. A later MACRIS Report, SPE.R (2003), which added to the boundaries of the previously established Spencer Town Center Historic District, described the origins of industrial development in Spencer: “farmers turned to cottage industries to supplement their incomes particularly during the winters when chores were fewer. Most towns in Massachusetts included cordwainers among their residents and a few were even willing to give land to a cordwainer who would settle and take over the making of boots. Spencer was fortunate that it attracted a boot maker of ingenuity and industry in Josiah Green.”⁷MACRIS Report SPE.R, section 8, 3. A cordwainer is a person who works with leather to make shoes. Not to be too pedantic, a cobbler is a person who repairs shoes. Cordwainer comes from cordovan leather, a word which derives from Córdoba, Spain, a historic producer of high quality leather used for, among other things, making shoes. In the nineteenth century the leather was produced locally, hence farmers often engaged in the practice of shoe-making in the winter.

The man who lived in the large house on the southwest corner of Greenville Street and Main Street, a man who at times called himself a “farmer” and at times called himself a “boot manufacturer” on Census forms over the decades, was an important figure in the development of this industry which came to define Spencer in the nineteenth century. Greenville Street is named, not for Josiah Green, but rather for the village in the southern part of the town of Leicester which can be reached by following the aptly-named road. The road is aptly (if coincidentally) named in Spencer as well, because the intersection of Main Street and Greenville Street was long the home of the Green family in Spencer, and the original house built by the first of the family to settle here still stands at the southwest corner of the junction. Josiah Green (1792-1876), the person who built the house, moved here from Leicester, where his ancestors had settled (some in the area that became known as Greenville as a result), and began fabricating the boots that earned him the sobriquet “father of the boot industry in Spencer.”⁸The Historical Narrative of the East Main Street-Cherry Street Historic Structure Report, 6. (SPE.K in the MACRIS entries). The Josiah Green House is the third house along Main Street heading west from Paxton Road shown on the 1834 map by Baldwin and the last one until just before North Street, the street adjacent to the “Congregational Meeting House.”

Thus, in 1834, there were only three houses in the three-quarters of a mile between Paxton Road and the Livermore property (about which more later) at the corner of North Street and Main Street, and only eight houses in total along the road from the border with Leicester (discussed in the last entry). If this section of the walk is now part of Spencer Center and, as the maps described above indicate, already appeared to be part of the center by the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was certainly a lot less populated in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In 1996 the area along Main Street east of the Congregational Meeting House was added to the Spencer Town Center Historic District (SPE.N, officially listed in 1986). The newly-added area (SPE.O) is, roughly, the 0.4-mile section of the road leading west from the Green House at 282 Main Street to North Street, which was virtually empty of houses on the 1834 map. Thus, with the exception of Josiah Green’s house, all the buildings along the road described in the historic structure report (SPE.O) date to the mid-nineteenth century or later. As we shall see, there are very few buildings along Main Street in the center of Spencer that date to the eighteenth century or that predate the Josiah Green House, not only in the area covered by SPE.O but also in the SPE.N report or in other areas subsequently added to the Historic District. The artifacts along the Upper Boston Post Road through most of the rest of Spencer principally date to the nineteenth century, with a handful of notable exceptions.

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Josiah Green not only lived in the oldest house along this section of the road, he also started, in his house, the industry for which Spencer became known. According to the National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form for the area (SPE.O), “Bootmaking for the wholesale boot trade in Spencer began in 1817 in the home of Josiah Green. A few years later, it was expanded when in 1820 Isaac Prouty also began manufacturing boots in his home [in north Spencer]. These early beginnings were significant to the future of Spencer, since bootmaking was quickly to become the town’s major industry. By 1830 the manufacture of boots was second in importance only to textile manufacturing here. Only a short time later, in the late 1830’s, it became the town’s leading industry.”⁹SPE.O, section 8, 4-5. Green’s business proved successful and production increased to the point that “the first larger boot shop built in the vicinity of Spencer’s town center was that of Josiah Green, built in 1834 on the eastern edge of town, across the street from his house on Main Street.”¹⁰SPE.O, section 8, 5. James Draper listed all the “products of industry” in Spencer in 1850, with “boot manufacturing” as the top industry. Draper recorded six boot manufacturing companies located in Spencer, including Josiah Green’s company, which was the highest-valued boot manufacturer, at $43,000, and the second-largest company in town, after the Bemis & Hall company, a gunpowder manufacturer, at $45,000. Incidentally, in 1850, total manufacturing in the town of Spencer was valued at $340,000, meaning that Josiah Green’s factory produced one of every eight dollars of the manufacturing value in the town at that time.¹¹Draper, 122.

The original house and the factory building still exist although both have been substantially altered. The Josiah Green House (SPE.64) was built sometimes after 1800 in the Federal style, and is “recognizably of its period, although it bears Gothic/Italianate style ornament added in the 1870’s.”¹²SPE.K, 4. SPE.K is a precursor to SPE.O, submitted to the Massachusetts Historic Commission in 1992, prior to applying for national recognition in 1996. SPE.K includes most of the buildings in SPE.O but, interestingly, the Josiah Green House and the Josiah Green Factory were omitted from the SPE.O report, which stops at Spring Street, one block west of Greenville Street. The factory building across the street (SPE.4) is a bland building with little architectural distinction. Although some elements of the original building likely remain, many additions were made over the years and the building ceased operation as a boot factory in 1892 after a local strike shut down operations. Today the building has been converted to apartments. Walling’s map of 1857 shows the building as “J Green Shoe Shop,” directly opposite the house on the southwest corner of Greenville and Main Street labelled as “J. Green.” On the 1870 map the building opposite the “J. Green” house is called “Josiah Green & Co. Boot Mfty.” After Green’s death in 1876 the house was occupied in 1884 by “Miss Sarah Green” (1840-1918), Josiah’s youngest daughter, who never married and lived in the house until her death, while across the street the “Boot Shop” was now called “J. and H.R. Green,” after Josiah’s son Henry R. Green (1829-1894) took over the company. “Miss Sarah Green” still occupied the house according to the 1898 map of the area, but the factory had become “H.S. & E.E. Green Cotton Underwear Manufactory,” a transformation which occurred after boot-making had ceased as a result of the 1892 strike.

A significant portion of the property along the south side of Main Street and virtually all of the property along the north side of Main Street west from Greenville Street belonged to some member of the Green family for most of the nineteenth century. So associated was the area with the Green family that Park Street, 300 yards west of the Josiah Green House, was called Green Street before 1898. George Walker published a detailed Atlas of Spencer Town Massachusetts in 1884 which shows the area along the road west from the Josiah Green House in exceptionally detailed maps.¹³Plates #36 and #37 show this section of Main Street. In 1884 the Green property extended west of Spring Street along the south side of the road, and much of it was owned by another son, Jonas Underwood Green (1832-1891), with the exception of the family home which was occupied by Sarah Green. Other Green siblings, principally Henry R. Green, owned more property south of Main Street along Spring Street and Greenville Street, which was eventually subdivided and sold off as lots.

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Henry R. Green also owned most of the property north of Main Street west of Greenville Street to a short distance beyond what is now Park Street, including the house at 259 Main Street, the most impressive house along this section of the road. The Henry R. Green House (1856; SPE.37) is a large Italianate house with a lovely large barn; the house and barn are situated slightly back from the road and are surrounded by large areas of open space and stone walls. In fact, there are no buildings between the old Green Boot Factory building and the Henry R. Green House. The property between and behind the two buildings, also once the property of the Green family, was donated to the town and is now know as Laurel Hill Park, a wetland area that extends up to Whittemore Pond and borders Luther Hill Park, about which more shortly. Although we are approaching the center of Spencer, the landscape here is quite bucolic, with only the charming Henry R. Green House on the north side and a series of lovely nineteenth-century houses lining the south side of Main Street. The historic structure report (SPE.O) describes it well: “At the eastern end of the historic district along Main Street, the area from Spring Street to just beyond Lake Street is among the most memorable sections of Spencer. Lined with large trees and well-cared-for buildings, some on larger lots, this section of Main Street creates an almost idyllic eastern entrance to the town. On both sides of the street, the area close to Spring Street has an especially strong mid-19th-century character. Buildings in this section are mostly Greek Revival and Italianate in style and are generally moderate in size and uniform in scale.”¹⁴SPE.O, section 7, 4.

Main Street continues slowly uphill west of Spring Street where a sign indicates the beginning of the Spencer Town Center Historic District. Just west of the Henry R. Green House, along this very charming section of the Upper Boston Post Road, is the District 3 Schoolhouse building (1856; SPE.7; northeast corner of Main Street and Park Street). This lovely Greek Revival building, now a private residence, is also set back from Main Street and is surrounded by open land. Park Street (formerly Green Street) is one of the two entrances to Luther Hill Park, a large park located on the southern shore of Lake Whittemore. The fourteen acres of land for the park were purchased from David Bemis in 1888, the money provided by Luther Hill, a local businessman, for whom the park was named after his death in 1902.¹⁵Fiske, History of Spencer, Massachusetts 1875-1975 (Spencer Historical Commission, 1990), 510, 518. Laurel Hill Park, which links to Luther Hill Park as noted above, was later provided to the town by descendants of Henry R. Green. Incidentally, at the same town meeting in 1888 at which Luther Hill announced his willingness to purchase the land for the town park, two other local businessmen donated money to fund a new high school (David Prouty) and a town library (Richard Sugden). Both of these buildings still exist along Main Street and will be discussed when I reach them.

Directly across Park Street from the old school building is another beautiful house, the J. Green and Charles H. Green House (1830s-1840s; SPE.38; 253 Main Street). This lovely Greek Revival-style house also has a barn, something common to more than a few of the houses along this section of the road. The houses across Main Street are perhaps slightly more modest but are nonetheless charming, including the Lorenzo Watson House (c. 1845; SPE.62; 266 Main Street), the Joseph C. Grout House (c. 1880; SPE.58; 252 Main Street), and the George Bemis 2nd House (c. 1890; SPE.60; 256 Main Street), where George Bemis lived after moving from the house at 301 Main Street where this entry began. Other Green family members lived in houses along the road west of here, but the main contiguous lots of the Green estate ended at the property at 253 Main Street.

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Heading to Church

The nice houses along Main Street continue all the way up the hill, with one interesting example after another of mid-nineteenth-century architecture lining both sides of the street to the summit at the junction with Lake Street, the main road leading into Luther Hill Park. Next, west from the Charles H. Green House on the north side of Main Street is the Boyce-Allen House at 249 Main Street (1856-1870; SPE.39) followed by the F. Drury House (245 Main Street; 1870-1877; SPE.40), the David Bemis House (243 Main Street; 1834-1856; SPE.41), the residence of the man who sold the property behind the house which became Luther Hill Park, and the Victorian Gothic John Avery House (241 Main Street; 1883; SPE.42).

On the south side of the street the collection of houses is equally impressive. Heading west from the Joseph Grout House is the Muzzy House (248 Main Street; 1834-1856; SPE.57) which served as the Congregational parsonage during periods of the nineteenth century, followed by the George S. Davis House (246 Main Street; 1877-1884; SPE.56), “one of the most highly ornamented and best preserved in the East Main Street-Cherry Street area,” the S.B. Green House (244 Main Street; 1856-1870; SPE.55), which also has an elegant carriage house on the property, and the William G. Muzzy House (242 Main Street; 1877-1884; SPE.54). This harmonious collection of well-built and well-maintained (for the most part) Victorian houses makes for a truly pleasant walk along this section of the Upper Boston Post Road, and it is only the undercard for the main event at the top of the hill.

The Upper Boston Post Road at the summit of the hill, just before the junction with Lake Street, reaches its highest elevation, from this point west to Springfield, at 976 feet above sea level. The view west from the heights of Main Street at Lake Street down into the center of town and over the valleys through which various streams and rivers flow into the Quaboag River, and eventually the Connecticut River, is spectacular. These are the same valleys through which the Upper Boston Post Road passes on its winding path to Springfield.

A spectacular house on the north side of Main Street just west of Lake Street sits prominently at the summit of the hill and shares the beautiful view west. The Tilson J. Sanderson House (239 Main Street; 1868-1870; SPE.6) is, according to the historic report, “an elaborate Greek Revival house, one of the most imposing residences on Main Street. A colonnade of the Ionic order forms the porch on the south and east sides. The pediment is intricately detailed with a complete entablature which continues around the entire house. An octagonal cupola with gold dome crowns the whole…This house was designed and built by Tilson J. Sanderson as his personal residence. Sanderson was a local contractor/builder turned architect. He was the contractor for many buildings in and around Spencer, and worked with a Worcester architect, Elbridge Boyden, on several of these occasions.” One of Sanderson’s buildings was the District #3 School shown and discussed above. Today Sanderson’s magnificent former home and its extravagant carriage house (1884; SPE.113), also built by Sanderson, is occupied by a dental practice.

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It is downhill from here, physically and, to some degree, metaphorically, to the center of Spencer, the location of most of the institutional buildings that are the principal theme of this walk. The houses in this hilltop neighborhood are also institutions of the town in their own way, as they represent the development of Spencer in the nineteenth century from a town of farmers who produced goods in the winter for extra income to a town of businessmen and manufacturers, for whom these elegant houses in this elevated neighborhood on the edge of town represented the pinnacle of success, with Tilson Sanderson not only responsible for building many of the houses, but also taking his place among the successful elite of the town with his own opulent house. The houses along the next block from Lake Street to North Street are also part of the 1996 addition (SPE.O) to the original boundaries of the Spencer Town Center Historic District (the original eastern boundary of the district created in 1986 was North Street). Although some of these houses are as elegant and well-maintained as the ones already mentioned, more than a few of them have been modified in recent times and/or are not as well-maintained. In the 1996 historic report for the district, a note of poignancy pervades the discussion of the houses along the road as it approaches the Congregational Meeting House: “In their original condition, they made a particularly important contribution to this section of Main Street near the Congregational Church. This effect has been diminished since, with the exception of the well-preserved, Queen Anne style Searles-Curtis House, they have lost many of their distinctive ornamental features to the unsympathetic application of new sidings.”¹⁶SPE.O Report Section 7, 11. To this I might add that, in the intervening thirty years since the above words were written, many of the houses along the road as it heads downhill into Spencer Center, like the Tilson Sanderson House, have been taken over by businesses and are no longer residences; the signage that is a necessity for commercial establishments as well as the addition of parking lots in the place where there were once landscaped yards and gardens inevitably diminishes the appeal of the buildings. At least most of the buildings have survived, which I have learned from experience, is not at all a sure thing even along the most tranquil stretches of the Upper Boston Post Road.

Even the aforementioned Searles-Curtis House (240 Main Street; SPE.53; c.1884) has been covered in “unsympathetic” vinyl siding since the historic report was written. Of the dozen or so houses along the road from the Tilson Sanderson House to the Congregational Church at North Street, only three or four have managed to stave off the ravages of vinyl siding, the steady expansion of asphalt parking lots at the expense of green space, commercial takeover, or general neglect. The neighborhood is still pleasant and the houses are still generally charming, but the contrast with the houses on the other side of the hill a few yards behind me is quite striking. The Nathan Hersey House (221 Main Street; SPE.45; c.1834-1856) is worthy of mention only because it was moved from its former location a little further west in order to create a park adjacent to the high school, as we shall soon see; otherwise it is another of the once grand mansions now diminished by “unsympathetic” additions and modifications. It does, however, have a nice beech tree in the front yard.

Two houses worth describing in detail are the last two before North Street along the north side of Main Street, which also happen to be the only other houses shown along this section of the road between the Josiah Green House (at the corner of Greenville and Main Street) and the “Congregational Meeting House” on Baldwin’s 1834 map above. The first house, at 217 Main Street, is the Smith-Watson House (c. 1800-1834; SPE.46), a house of mixed Federal and Greek Revival style that appears on Baldwin’s map as “Mrs Smith & Watson,” on the 1857 and 1870 and 1884 maps as “W.O. Watson,” and on the 1898 map as “Estate of Wm. O. Watson.” William Oliver Watson (1815-1896) was the grandson of Oliver Watson, a figure discussed in detail in the previous entry. William Watson is listed in the census reports for the decades from 1840-1870 as a “bootmaker,” and in the 1880 Census as a “retired boot manufacturer.” The house must have been built prior to 1821 as it is discussed as the site of a meeting in that year in Henry Tower’s Historical Sketches Relating to Spencer as the “house of Dea. Wm. White (the house now owned and occupied by Wm. O. Watson).”¹⁷ Henry Tower, Historical Sketches Relating to Spencer, Massachusetts. Four Volumes.(W.J. Heffernan, 1901-1909), Volume II, 170. The fact that William White was William Watson’s grandfather implies that he may have inherited the house after White’s death in 1826. “Mrs. Smith” may have been an elderly relative living in the house in 1834 as Watson would have been only nineteen years-old at the time and did not marry until 1842.

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The last house before the Congregational Church is a large blue house with a plaque over the door informing the passers-by that “The Walter Livermore House is one of the oldest houses still standing in the center of Spencer.” That the house is old is an accurate statement as the house appears on Baldwin’s map of 1834, owned by “W. Livermore,” but the “W” stands for Walton Livermore, not Walter. Walton Livermore (1786-1835) was “a merchant, justice of the peace, representative to the General Court, and often one of the municipal officers of the town.”¹⁸Draper, 224. Walton Livermore married Mary White, daughter of Deacon William White and aunt to future next-door neighbor William Watson. The architectural details of the house indicate “a likely Federal period date of construction,” although later additions likely occurred “since the door frames of the two main entrances date from the Greek Revival period.”¹⁹SPE.O report, Section 7, 10. The exterior of the house, like so many others in the area, has undergone substantial “unsympathetic applications of new sidings,” including alterations to the window frames. One hopes that perhaps the original detail remains under the siding, to be rescued by some future more sympathetic owner.

On the 1857 map of the area Walton’s son, George H. Livermore (1819-1910), is shown as the owner. George Livermore moved to New York by 1870 and was buried in New Rochelle, New York, and the house was owned by “P. Allen” on the 1870 map and “E. Shepard on the 1884 and 1898 maps. The Walton Livermore House and the Josiah Green House (along with the Smith-Watson house next door to the Livermore House) are bookends to the local neighborhood historic district appended to the original district in 1996; they are the only houses shown in this area of town on the 1834 map, and they are located at opposite ends of Main Street, with one flanking the western edge of the boundary addition and one sitting just outside the eastern boundary of the district. The lovely collection of houses in the district between these older bookends, which were all built after 1834, is important, as the historic structure report describes: “The East Main Street-Cherry Street Historic District was built strictly as a residential area and it retains that character today. It is this residential character that most strongly distinguishes it from the contiguous existing Spencer Center National Register Historic District….The East Main Street-Cherry Street District grew up in direct response to industry and commercial activities occurring within the territory of the existing town center historic district.”²⁰SPE.O, Section 7, 3. As I step across North Street, I enter the “contiguous existing Spencer Center National Register Historic District” and encounter the most iconic institutional building in Spencer, the First Congregational Church of Spencer.

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The Church is the Town.

The origins of the town of Spencer predate the official existence of the town by more than fifty years. The original eight-by-eight-mile tract (64 mi²) purchased in 1686 by the proprietors of what would become the towns of Leicester and Spencer was originally divided into an eastern tract and a western tract. The eastern tract was the first section divided into lots, which then were sold to prospective settlers, while the western half was set aside for future settlement. The eastern tract was sufficiently settled by the 1720s so the town of Leicester was formed, and it included both the eastern and the western tracts. The western tract was subsequently divided into lots to be sold.²¹This summary is based on the chapter on the history of Spencer written by J.W. Temple and published in The History of Worcester County (edited by D. Hamilton Hurd, Two Volumes; J.W. Lewis, 1889). Temple’s entry, Chapter LXXXV, is in Volume I, pp. 631-667. Temple, a resident of Spencer, will appear in the next entry of this project. Settlement of the western tract was slower, and by 1740 there were “not more than 150 inhabitants.”²²Temple, in Hurd, Worcester County, 632. Draper points out that “the inhabitants of the westerly part labored under many disadvantages,” not least of which was the preference by the town meeting to fund projects like road-building primarily in the more densely-populated eastern half of town.²³Draper, 33. Another difficulty was the lengthy trip required by settlers in the western tract to reach the meeting house in Leicester Center; as attendance was mandatory for town residents, the trip of three to seven miles each way, assuming the traveler lived on the Upper Boston Post Road (which was most certainly not true of every resident in the western tract, in which case the distance could be as long as ten miles), was a difficult one even in good weather on decent roads, neither of which was guaranteed in the western tract.

Thus, as early as 1741, the settlers of the western tract tried to separate from the town of Leicester. Although approved by the General Court, this first attempt, as well as subsequent attempts to form a new town, were vetoed by the Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, William Shirley.²⁴William Shirley (1694-1771) served as Governor intermittently from 1741-1756. Subsequently he served as Governor of the Bahamas from 1760-1768. He died on his estate in Roxbury, which still exists and is well worth a visit. Speculation about the reason Shirley declined to grant town status to Spencer focuses on his difficult relationship with the General Court, which would have been exacerbated if a new town was added to the province, since each town was allowed a representative to the General Court. Shirley did, however, allow the western section of Leicester to form its own parish in 1744, and the seeds of the future town were sown: “This was some relief, as they were about settling the Rev. Mr. Eaton as their minister, and they became a Parish, by an act of incorporation, July 18, 1744.”²⁵Draper, 35. As we shall see, the Leicester West Parish Meeting House had already been erected and the soon-to-be appointed minister, Reverend Joshua Eaton, had already been preaching for months before the official decree was made.

As was the case in many of the towns along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road, the first step to formation of a town was typically the establishment of a separate church. The town of Spencer is unusual in that the process from settlement to parish status to town formation was unusually protracted. In large part this reflected the political tensions in Massachusetts in the decades leading to the Revolution. The parishioners of Reverend Eaton’s meeting house tried again to separate from Leicester in 1749 and were again rebuffed, this time by the acting Governor Spencer Phips (1685-1757). However, in 1753, the residents of the West Parish of Leicester made progress when Phips (again acting governor) “did acknowledge that the precinct could be elevated to a district which gave the new district of Spencer all the rights and privileges of a town but without representation to the General Court.”²⁶Hurd, 633. This “elevation” of status was almost certainly influenced by the choice of the name for the newly-created district; Draper states that “the town was named Spencer probably in honor of Lieutenant Governor Spencer Phipps.”²⁷Draper, 33. This new status lasted until 1775 when the Provincial Congress, meeting against the orders of Governor Thomas Gage, passed “an act of August 23, 1775, which made all places, incorporated originally by the name of districts, towns, to every intent and purpose whatsoever.”²⁸Hurd, 634.  This act was confirmed in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. Spencer was now officially a town in the newly-formed Commonwealth of Massachusetts, although it had de facto been a town since 1775, which is considered the origin date by the town.

The construction of the meeting house five miles west of the Leicester Meeting House along the Upper Boston Post Road, in what became known as the “upper village” of Spencer, likely in 1743, is the more significant milestone in the formation of a town identity, despite the fact that the acquisition of the current name of the town was a decade in the future and the official acknowledgment of the town’s existence would not occur for more than three decades. The formation of a parish in eighteenth-century New England was central to the idea of town identity, as the historian of Leicester and former Governor of Massachusetts Emory Washburn wrote of the formation of the West Parish of Leicester in his Historical Sketches of the Town of Leicester: “by the execution of this deed, the connection between the easterly and westerly portions of the town was, in a good measure, practically dissolved, although they continued to form one municipal corporation till 1753.”²⁹Emory Washburn, Historical Sketches of the Town of Leicester during the first Century from its Settlement (Boston: John Wilson & Son, 1860), 18.

As mentioned earlier, a wealthy Boston merchant, Nathaniel Cunningham, provided land in 1740 for “the accommodation of a meeting house.” In 1743, at a meeting in Boston between the proprietors and ten of the inhabitants of the western tract a request was made “for encouragement speedily to settle a learned and orthodox minister of the gospel among them.”³⁰Draper, 88. Joshua Eaton was preaching in the “imperfectly” built meeting house in what is now Spencer as early as September, 1743, and the church was officially formed in May 1744, with Joshua Eaton “subscribed as pastor” on the resulting covenant.³¹Draper, 90. Eaton was officially invited to become minister for the parish on May 28, 1744 and accepted, after negotiating the settlement for several months, in September, 1744. Note that the establishment of the first church in what became Spencer occurred, with the exception of the official acceptance by Eaton to the position of minister, prior to the official establishment of the parish by the provincial authorities, a naked act of self-determination indicative of the independent streak of the residents of Massachusetts that was to prove so troublesome to the royal government.

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The first minister of the town of Spencer, Joshua Eaton (1714-1772), was not originally a minister. Born in the part of Watertown that is now Waltham, Eaton studied for the bar after graduating from Harvard and practiced law in Worcester for five years, beginning in 1737. In 1740 he attended a sermon by George Whitefield and decided to become a minister.³²Draper, 90-92. After studying theology for two years he was invited to preach in Spencer in September 1743 and was invited to become minister of the new parish in 1744 as discussed above.³³Hurd, 633 Ebeneezer Parkman, minister for the town of Westborough, traveled frequently along the Upper Boston Post Road and recorded in his diary multiple visits with Joshua Eaton. As early as October 23, 1737, Parkman “called at Mr. Eaton’s” when he was a new lawyer in Worcester. Parkman again visited Eaton in Worcester on August 23, 1744, when he was still a lawyer but about to become a full-time minister. Parkman subsequently referred to him over the next several years as “Mr. Eaton’s, in Leicester,” until a visit on October 7, 1757, when he wrote that he “dined at Mr. Eatons in Spencer.”³⁴Parkman was inconsistent in his spelling and in his use of apostrophes.

On August 24, 1759, Parkman recorded in his diary that he “dined at Judge Chandlers [in Worcester] — at ¼ past 5 I mounted the Chair in my Journey for Brookfield — but got no further than Mr. Eatons — where I was kindly received and lodged,” which is an example both of the generous relationship between the ministers of various towns and of the difficulty of travel, Chandler’s house in Worcester being located near what is now Worcester City Hall, about eleven miles from Eaton’s house near the meeting house in Spencer. Parkman recorded several visits with Joshua Eaton through 1769, but the references end at this point. Both Parkman (1703-1782) and Eaton were traveling less as they aged and Eaton died in 1772, so perhaps Eaton was already unwell in the years before his death. (Draper notes that Eaton was “often called from his labors by severe indisposition.”)³⁵Draper, 93. Although he did not mention the death of Joshua Eaton in his diary, Parkman did record on October 20, 1773, that “Mr. Joseph Pope is this Day to be ordained, at Spencer.” Joseph Pope (1746-1826) served as the second minister of the Congregational Church of Spencer for forty-six years, retiring from the pulpit after suffering a stroke in 1818.³⁶Draper, 95. Thus, with the exception of the occasional visiting preacher, the Congregational Church in Spencer had only two ministers over the first seventy-five years of its existence.

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Unlike Leicester, but similar to many other New England towns, the Congregational Church was the only established church in the town of Spencer for the first seventy-five years of its existence. The first “imperfectly built” meeting house was erected sometime around 1743 at what is now the northwest corner of North Street and Main Street, where some version of the original church has been located for the last 283 years. The first building lasted until 1772, “when a new, substantial, and even elegant house for those days, was built, being 56 feet long by 47 feet wide. In 1802, a tower and cupola with a bell was added, and [in] 1838, the same house was enlarged, and entirely new finished and new modeled, within and without, in handsome modern style.”³⁸Draper, 90. This “entirely new finished and new modeled” building can be seen in an engraving of a view of the town made around 1839 by John Warner Barber (1798-1885), an artist and writer who traveled through Massachusetts and many other eastern states, describing the towns in each of the states he visited in great detail, often engraving views of the towns through which he passed. The image above is a reproduction of the engraving Barber made of Spencer “from the westward, upon the road to Brookfield,” where “the Congregational church is seen on the right, on the elevated ground in the distance.”³⁹ Barber, Historical Collections, 605. Barber, a Connecticut native, produced detailed books for many other states, including all of New England, New York, and New Jersey, and as far south as Virginia, and as far west as Ohio. He later produced a book entitled Our Whole Country (1861) and one entitled European Historical Collections (1855). In case the reader has failed to notice, I will point out that, although I discovered Barber’s work only after I commenced upon this project, I certainly feel a strong connection to Barber’s style and ambition, and continue to be astounded that someone nearly two centuries ago carried out a project not dissimilar to the project traced in these entries.

The second building lasted until January 1, 1862, when it was destroyed by fire; and a new building was dedicated on April 8, 1863.⁴⁰Hurd, 637. This building survived, with modifications over the years, until, as an article in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette states: “the First Congregational Church of Spencer burned to the ground on June 2, 2023, after the steeple was struck by lightning.  The congregation dates to 1743. The church that caught fire in 2023 was built in 1863 after fire destroyed the previous building a year earlier. The church became the First Congregational Church of Spencer, United Church of Christ after a merger in 1968.” A new building is being erected that is much smaller than the previous versions, likely more in keeping with the reduced size of the congregation, which now competes with numerous other denominations that have appeared in Spencer in the two centuries since the Congregational Church ceased to be the only church in town. The rise and fall of these various denominations will be covered as I continue my walk west through Spencer.

Joshua Eaton, Joseph Pope, and many other early citizens of Spencer were laid to rest in the Old Cemetery located on a hill directly behind the church. Established with part of the land donation made by Nathaniel Cunningham in 1740, this lovely small (about four acres) cemetery overlooks the new church and its diminutive steeple (see photo above), and the views out across the valleys are impressive. This was the only cemetery in the town until Pine Grove Cemetery in North Spencer was opened in 1845.⁴¹Fiske, 539. I linger here for a few minutes to search for some of the graves of the people I encountered during my research for these entries on the route of the Upper Boston Post Road through the town of Spencer, to admire the headstones and the view from the cemetery, to reflect on mortality, and to get off the road and into the grassy, shady cemetery for a few minutes on a hot day.

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Going to School.

The church and the cemetery are located on a rise on the north side of Main Street. At some point, the land in front of the church was leveled to create a small parking area, a small drive was built leading up to the church, and a retaining wall was built along the north side of Main Street. Easily overlooked is a plaque embedded in the wall, one of the plaques placed in virtually every town along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road, commemorating the journey of General George Washington en route to Cambridge to assume control of the newly-formed Continental Army in 1775 (see photo below). Washington passed this way again in 1789 and even stayed the night in a tavern in the town of Spencer, a subject which will be discussed in the next entry. The plaque serves as a timely reminder to me that this entry is becoming bogged down in the details of the history of the town of Spencer and that I need to get moving along the ostensible subject of this project, which is purportedly about the route of the Upper Boston Post Road from Boston to Springfield.

However, it is not as easy to make progress as it seems. Although I am only four hundred yards from the planned end of this entry, there are many buildings and artifacts along the road on the short walk downhill into the “lower village” which attract my attention and thwart any effort to increase my pace. Directly across the street from the Washington Memorial Highway plaque is a charming red two-story Italianate-style building with a plaque on it which explains that it is called Denny Hall. Draper describes the origins of the building: “In 1857, the town caused to be built a large and commodious building for the accommodation of the high school. The building is two stories in height, elegantly finished, with cupola and bell, the lower story fitted for the use of the school, and the upper for a hall, called Denny Hall, in honor of Mr. Charles E. Denny, who generously bequeathed the sum of two thousand dollars, to be appropriated towards that object.”⁴²Draper, 79. Charles E. Denny (1815-1856) was another of the many successful boot manufacturers in Spencer. Denny appeared in the last entry of the walk through the town of Leicester, as he purchased the farm for his parents in 1842 that later became known as Soojian farm. This building, which was originally located on the elevated area across Main Street, just to the west of the Congregational Church, served as the high school until 1888 when a new larger building was erected and Denny Hall was moved across the street to its current location. The building continued to be used as a grammar school and as a junior high school, but it was later abandoned and the town sold it at auction in 1971 to William Ekleberry, a member of the family that restored the Spencer Country Inn, discussed in the previous entry.⁴³Fiske, 484-485. Fortunately Ekleberry won the auction, as his chief competitor in the auction was the owner of a beauty salon located next door whose intention was to raze the building and replace it with a parking lot. The building remains in private hands today, as a sign on the door indicates, and appears to be in decent shape, although the cupola was removed in the 1980s.

The juxtaposition of the Congregational Church and Denny Hall across the road from each other on the hill leading down into the “lower village” marks the eastern boundary of the original Spencer Town Center Historic District (SPE.N on the MACRIS website), which was entered into the National Register of Historic Places in 1986, as discussed earlier. The district continues west down the hill along Main Street and originally ended at High Street (before later reports were produced which resulted in an expansion of the district), a distance of about 0.4 miles. Denny Hall (920 feet above sea level) and the Congregational Church (942 feet above sea level) are located at the highest elevation in the original Historic District and create, as the Historic Structure Report (SPE.N) states, “a dramatic entrance to the district from the east with the present Denny Hall (1857) and Congregational Church (1863) [this was written decades before the church burned] stand[ing] on either side of the road. Both of these elaborate frame structures were designed by Elbridge Boyden of Worcester. Between this point and Maple Street are the former homes of many of Spencer’s prominent citizens (now converted to offices) interspersed with civic structures.”⁴⁴Spencer Town Center Historic District Report (SPE.N), Section 7, 1.

One of the most impressive of these civic structures is the building just west of the First Congregational Church that replaced Denny Hall. The elegant Richardsonian-Romanesque building at 195 Main Street (SPE.2) opened as the new high school in 1889. At the Spencer town meeting on April 2, 1888, the money for the building was donated by David Prouty (1813-1892), a local manufacturer and businessman. This was the same meeting at which Luther Hill funded the town park and Richard Sugden funded the town library. Prouty had intended to leave thirty thousand dollars to fund a library upon his death but Sugden’s offer to fund the library caused Prouty to pivot and provide the necessary funds for the high school immediately.⁴⁵Fiske, 315-316. The new high school was named David Prouty High School in his honor, and the building served (with a rear addition in the 1930s) as the high school until a new building was opened in 1966, three-quarters of a mile east of the old building, on land acquired from John Sibley (part of Sibley Farm) opposite the building at 301 Main Street where the walk described in this entry began. The old building was used as David Prouty Junior High School after 1966, but eventually a new junior high school was built and the building has served as a senior housing facility since 2010. The building once had an elegant tower but it was removed after suffering storm damage. A plaque with an engraved image of David Prouty accompanied by an acknowledgment of his gift is embedded high up on the brick facade of the building.⁴⁶I first heard of David Prouty High School in the early 1980s, as a fellow student in my residence hall at WPI graduated from the school. It likely stayed in my head because it is unusual for a high school, particularly a public high school, to have the name of a benefactor. Most public high schools have much more anodyne names which are almost always the name of the town in which the school is located followed by the words “high school,” so this curiously-named school lodged itself in my memory banks until the day I passed the school along the Upper Boston Post Road, when the memory came flooding back into my consciousness. As it happens, David Prouty High School serves students from both Spencer and from neighboring East Brookfield, so perhaps the unusual name is appropriate in this instance.

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Plot Twists.

Immediately to the west of the elegant former high school building is a park which was funded by another member of the Prouty family. Isaac Lothrop Prouty Park was built on land purchased in 1903 by the park’s namesake from the estate of Nathan Hersey, whose house, which can be seen on maps of the area from Walling’s map of 1857 through to the Atlas of Worcester County map of Spencer (Plate 23) from 1898, remained on the property. The house was moved down Main Street in 1905 to its current location at 221 Main Street as discussed earlier.⁴⁷Fiske, 531. The park is the location of the elegant Soldier’s Monument, on which are engraved tablets listing the 319 soldiers from Spencer who served in the Civil War. In later decades thirteen trees were planted in honor of the thirteen soldiers from Spencer who died in the First World War. It is also the location of smaller memorials to soldiers from Spencer who served in subsequent wars.⁴⁸Fiske, 530-534. The collection of memorials of varying quality in this small park serves as yet another reminder that they just don’t make them like they used to.

Most of the land west of the First Congregational Church originally belonged to the first minister, Rev. Joshua Eaton, as part of his settlement. Joseph Pope, the second minister of the town, lived in the house built by Joshua Eaton, which was still standing in 1860, when Draper wrote of it, in his History of Spencer, as an “ancient house built by him [Eaton] in 1745, being now 115 years old, and still in good repair, and now owned by William Pope, Esq., the only surviving child of his parents.”⁴⁹Draper, 96. The house next west of the “Congregational Meeting House” on the north side of Main Street on Baldwin’s 1834 map is the house of “W. Pope.” The church built a vestry on the land adjacent to the Pope property in 1832, which served as a fee-paying high school before Denny Hall was built on the same site in 1857.⁵⁰Fiske, 314-315. Fiske also reports that the town voted in 1856 to establish a public high school in response to a new state law requiring each town to provide a high school. Something similar happened in Leicester, as discussed in a previous entry. The vestry, which is not shown on the 1834 map by Baldwin but is shown on Walling’s 1857 map, was moved to West Main Street. Pope donated a piece of his property to accommodate the larger Denny Hall.⁵¹Hurd, 648. On Walling’s 1857 map the “N. Hersey” property sits between the vestry and the “W. Pope” property, which indicates Pope likely also sold Hersey the land for his house sometime before 1857. This is the land that is now Isaac Lothrop Prouty Park.

On the 1870 map of the area, there is an additional property and house, listed as owned by “H.P. Starr,” between the “N. Hersey” property and the property listed as that of “J. Pope” (Joseph Pope, 1822-1900, William Pope’s son), which indicates that more land was sold by the Pope family. The “H.P. Starr” house on the 1870 map appears on the 1898 map, still shown as the property of H.P. Starr located at 185 Main Street. The Second Empire-style house built by Hezekiah P. Starr (1832-1922; house dates to 1868; SPE.107) still stands at 185 Main Street, one of the few houses along this section of Main Street to survive the various twists and turns that have befallen other properties along the road into Spencer center. Although the house has not been moved or razed and its external structure is essentially intact, the signs in the front of the house, advertising various commercial enterprises and offering both office space and apartments for rent, indicate it has suffered a fate similar to most of the remaining former residences along this section of Main Street west of the church.

The house built by Joshua Eaton and later owned by William Pope was also described by Joseph Warren Temple (1833-1914), another local historian, writing in 1889, as “the oldest dwelling standing in town.”⁵²Hurd, 650. Temple goes on to say that the house was later “owned by Hon. William Upham, son-in-law of the latter; and since his death, Mrs. Lucretia H., widow of the late William Upham, has owned and occupied the premises. This building has been carefully preserved for nearly a century and a half, and bids fair to pass far into the twentieth century as a venerable land-mark representing the birth of the Leicester West Precinct.”⁵³Ibid. Needless to say, the house has long since been removed; today a mid-twentieth century ranch house is located on the property at 181 Main Street. The original house was still located here as late as 1922, where it is shown on Plate 11 of a Sanborn Insurance map of Spencer from that year. Earlier maps, for example from 1884, show the house and property belonging to “Mrs. Lucretia H. Upham,” as does the 1898 map (“L.H. Upham”). Lucretia Upham (1825-1916) is shown on the 1910 Census living at 181 Main Street in Spencer. The “oldest house” in Spencer survived into the twentieth century, to at least 1922, but what happened to it subsequently remains a mystery.

In the same paragraph in which Temple describes the Eaton/Pope/Upham house, he also teases another intriguing possibility when describing the town at the time of the second visit (and overnight stay) of George Washington to Spencer in 1789: “There were but two dwellings in the ‘Upper Village’ at this time, viz., the ‘Morse House,’ now standing on the west corner of Main and May Streets, and the ‘Pope Mansion.'”⁵⁴Hurd, 650. Draper, writing in 1860, also states that “In what was once called the upper village, there were only two dwelling houses, viz: the Rev. Joseph Pope’s, now owned by his son William Pope, Esq., and the house now owned by Mr. Washington Morse, and occupied by Deacon Oliver Morse and Reuel Jones.”⁵⁵Draper, 69. May Street did not exist in 1857 but the house of Deacon Morse is shown on Walling’s map of that year directly opposite Main Street from what was then called Grove Street and is now called North Street. In 1870 the house and property directly across from what was now called North Street was owned by Isaac Prouty. May Street, which runs south from Main Street almost opposite North Street, appears on the 1884 map of the area (Plate 21, see map at end of this entry) and the house on the “west corner of Main and May” is owned by David Prouty (although he himself lived in a house a little west of the Pope house as we shall soon see). On the 1898 map the same house, shown as 224 Main Street, was owned by W.H. Prentice. On the Sanborn Insurance Map of 1922 (Plate 12), a house of similar proportions to the one shown on the 1898 map (and indeed, on Sanborn maps of the same year) was located at 224 Main Street, sharing the property with a vacant building that was listed as a “car barn” on the 1898 map, a building which separated 224 Main Street from Denny Hall (shown in its current location but labeled as 216 Main Street. Today it is listed as 220 Main Street). Today, on the site of the former “car barn,” there is a small house (perhaps the former beauty salon discussed above?) located at 222 Main Street, between Denny Hall and the house at 224 Main Street.

It comes as a bit of a surprise to discover that the original Spencer Town Center Historic District boundary ends at Denny Hall and does not include the house that currently is located at 224 Main Street. To be fair, the house looks unremarkable (see photo above) from the street and would not be a subject of attention in this entry if not for the intriguing statements above by Temple and Draper. What makes it more intriguing is that yet another entry in the MACRIS records for Spencer (SPE.M), undated but likely connected to the original report for the historic district, contains a brief description of the area around Denny Hall and the First Congregational Church which shows the house at 224 Main Street on a map, drawn in pencil (see below), labeled as the “oldest house.”

The report (SPE.O) which resulted in the eastward extension of the boundaries of the original Historic District (SPE.N), which formerly ended at Denny Hall and the First Congregational Church but were expanded to include the area from the Livermore house at 215 Main Street east to the Josiah Green House (in other words, the buildings described in the first part of this entry) mentions the house at 224 Main Street in passing but curiously does not include it in its list of important buildings: “No buildings built prior to 1834 are known to exist in the former lower village. The only pre-1834 structure still surviving in the existing Spencer Town Center National Register Historic District [SPE.N] is the unfortunately altered, four-bay, gable-end Morse House (1800-1834), 224 Main Street, on the west corner of Main and May Streets in the upper village.”⁵⁶SPE.O report, section 8, 6.

A search of the map on the MACRIS website reveals that there is a report specifically for the house at 224 Main Street (SPE.109), a house which is excluded from any of the historic reports detailing the neighborhood (i.e. SPE.N, SPE.O, etc) in which the property is located. The report was produced for the Massachusetts Historical Commission and is dated May 4, 1969. The “recorder” is listed as Tony P. Wrenn, the same name (and handwriting) listed as “recorder” on the report shown in the image above (SPE.M). Wrenn writes that, although the house at 224 Main Street is “said to be the oldest house in Spencer, this house has been severely remodeled recently. The central chimney is gone, replaced by two simple brick stacks to the rear and interior of the ridge roof. The doorway is interesting but [the] window sash has been changed, and a modern bow window has replaced the two original windows to the right of the entrance.” Apparently these changes were deemed too severe to include the house in any of the historic structure reports, a decision I find puzzling in light of the fact that, regardless of the changes, the building and the site have a substantial claim to be the oldest house standing in Spencer.

What makes the house even more intriguing is that there is a building shown on Baldwin’s map of the town from 1834 located directly opposite the “Congregational Meeting House” in approximately the same location as the house at 224 Main Street, a house labelled “Bemis’ Inn.” Although the date of construction of the house at 224 Main Street is recorded as 1750 on the report produced by Wrenn, and although Temple claims the house was on the Upper Boston Post Road when George Washington passed by in 1789, Draper does not record the house in his list of the “twenty-five buildings (not including barns)” present along “the whole of Main street, from Leicester to Brookfield” at the time of the visit of Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, a Frenchman who traveled the road in 1788 and recorded his impressions of Spencer and other towns along the way, a subject to which I shall return in the next entry.⁵⁷Draper, 73. The later report (SPE.O) which mentions the house at 224 Main Street but does not record it as a structure of importance, estimates the date of construction of the house as between 1800 and 1834, possibly because the report considered it to be the building shown as “Bemis’ Inn” on Baldwin’s map, thus already in existence in 1834. An earlier map of Spencer from 1830 (also by Baldwin) shows “Bemis’ Inn” across from the Congregational Meeting House, indicating its existence by 1830. None of the almanacs that I have examined in the period from 1780-1810 mention a Bemis tavern in Spencer, which makes it likely that, even if the building existed prior to becoming a tavern, it was not a tavern before 1810. All the evidence, taken together, indicates that the building likely dates to a period after 1788 but before 1834, and that it may have served as a tavern sometime after 1810 but before 1834. It was no longer a tavern by 1857, when Deacon Morse occupied the building.

There is yet another possibility: the house at 224 Main Street is not the Bemis Inn at all. On Baldwin’s map of 1834 there are in fact two buildings located across the street from the church, both owned by “L. Bemis” (possibly Lorenzo Bemis). It is possible that 224 Main Street is the house labelled “L. Bemis” on the map and that another house a little west is the one labeled “Bemis Inn.” Evidence for this hypothesis comes from local historian Jeffrey Fiske in his History of Spencer. Most of the land along the south side of Main Street west of the house of Deacon Morse to Ash Street, as well as substantial lots along Main Street even further down the hill in the second half of the nineteenth century belonged to two brothers, Asa T. Jones (1820-1865) and Erastus Jones (1826-1907). The lot owned by the Jones brothers directly across the street from the church was donated for the removal of Denny Hall in 1888. Immediately to the west was a Baptist church which had been built in 1885, also on land owned by the Erastus Jones (Asa died in 1865). According to Jeffrey Fiske, the congregation was searching for a suitable location for a church and in 1882 “purchased the old Bemis tavern on the east corner of Ash and Main Streets. This building was one of the historic landmarks of the town. Amasa Bemis ran it prior to 1831, and when he was postmaster, he had the post office there. The tavern was sold at auction and was to be moved to a new location. However, it was found not to be sound enough to move, and was sold to George Langevin, who took the building down and sold the materials. He did very well, easily making a profit over the $150 for the building.”⁵⁸Fiske, 277-278. Although there are no footnotes or sources in Fiske’s account of the demise of the tavern, or indeed in the book as a whole (nor is there an index which makes the more than 700-page book exceedingly difficult to use), his book is clearly well-researched and on the occasions that I have independent evidence about a particular subject, his remarks on the subject are typically consistent with the evidence. I am inclined to believe Fiske’s statement about the Bemis Inn which further clouds the issue.

As is clear from this long discussion of a single, unremarkable, and easily-overlooked house along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road, sometimes even a simple question such as “what is the oldest house along the Upper Boston Post Road in Spencer?” is much more difficult to answer than it appears at first glance. Some old-looking houses are not as old as they look or have been “restored” to a style from an earlier period, while others have been altered so severely that it is impossible to say how much of the building is original. Buildings are also moved around, as we have seen with some of the buildings in this one short stretch of the road. There are almost always gaps in the chain of evidence or simple factual errors that have been passed down unquestioningly from one local historian to the next, which also make it difficult to make definitive statements about some of the buildings or artifacts encountered along the road. The best that can be hoped for is a clear trail of evidence linking a specific building to a specific location for an extended period of time, but this outcome is very rare. Churches are usually the best bet in this regard, but it is unusual even for a church to survive intact through three centuries, as we have seen in the case of the First Congregational Church in Spencer. Sometimes it feels as though the walk along the Upper Boston Post Road and this entire project is mostly about chasing shadows, exemplified by this time-consuming and unresolved search for evidence to support the simple question posed above about the house at 224 Main Street. And yet, the detailed study of individual buildings or property lots usually leaves me with a deeper appreciation of the fact that the Upper Boston Post Road has always been a path through a protean landscape and that the complexity of the history of the towns through which the road passes is a lesson in humility. It is impossible to ever be able to completely “understand” or to “know” the Upper Boston Post Road, just as it is impossible to completely understand or know about any subject; the best that anyone can do is to approach the subject with open eyes and an open mind, observe and study, and try to achieve a level of understanding that is satisfying within the constraints of time and effort that limit any human endeavor. In other words, the more I learn the more I realize how much I do not know, which makes me more interested in trying harder moving forward.

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Boots on the Ground.

There is a never-ending tension in this project between moving forward, covering ground and following the road to the next town, and remaining in one place, studying the evolution of the road or even one artifact along the road in as much detail as possible. The imperative to move eventually wins, as it must in a project that is ostensibly about walking. In this particular entry the actual finish line is in sight, less than four hundred yards away, at the bottom of the hill. Six hundred and fifty steps away (sadly, I actually counted!), but also through more than two centuries of change. However, as was stated earlier, the closer I get to the finish line, the more the buildings that line the road have been altered, moved, or even destroyed, typically for commercial reasons, which makes the walk less appealing than I had anticipated. This is, in fact, something that is not atypical historically in Spencer. Most of the money in the nineteenth century in the town was made from manufacturing, principally shoes and boots, and old houses were frequently knocked down and replaced by shoe factories, many of which were also later knocked down to be replaced by more modern commercial enterprises. Very few structures from the Federal era or before survive and only a few of the factory buildings remain. Few of the many factories making boots and shoes survived into the twentieth century, and there are no factories making shoes or boots in Spencer today.

Josiah Green may have been an early producer of boots in Spencer, but his greatest legacy to the town was perhaps his willingness to take on young employees who wanted to learn the trade. As Temple points out, “many of his workmen left his employ to engage in the business on their own account. According to the laws of trade, some were a success and some a failure, and of the former class the most successful of his apprentices were Charles E. Denny and Asa T. Jones.”⁵⁹Hurd, 659. Denny, as we have seen, was wealthy enough before his early death to fund the first high school named for him and now located on the property once owned by his fellow “apprentice” Asa T. Jones. Much of the property along the south side of Main Street leading down into the former lower village belonged, in the nineteenth century, to Asa Jones and his younger brother Erastus Jones.

Asa Jones was one of the more successful of the myriad figures who formed and reformed partnerships to establish shoe and boot factories in the nineteenth century. Jones struck out on his own in 1841, first making boots in the Walton Livermore House at the corner of Main Street and North Street (see photo and discussion above), before he later moved operations to a larger building along the south side of Main Street. Asa Jones died in 1865 at the age of 45, but his younger brother Erastus took over operations, first in partnership with his brother-in-law Hezekiah Starr (the man who built the house at 185 Main Street, also discussed above), then with Frank Dunton (incorrectly spelled “Dutton” in the SPE.N historic report), who built a large, Second Empire-style mansion in 1876 with his profits, located at 204 Main Street (SPE.108, see photo above), directly across the street from the house of his partner, Hezekiah Starr. The large new mansion was built on the former estate of James Draper (1778-1868), the author of the original History of Spencer; Draper’s house is shown on Baldwin’s 1834 map and on Walling’s 1857 map of Spencer, while on the 1870 map the property is described as “Est. of J. Draper” and, by 1884 the map shows a large house on the lot owned by “F.E. Dunton.” The Dunton House, like the Starr House and many of the surviving residences along this section of the road, has been altered for commercial use in the recent past, but is still in decent shape and is currently an apartment building.

Next door to the Dunton House and across the street from the Starr House, on the corner of Main Street and Linden Street, is the factory building which produced the profits that built the large houses. The E. Jones & Company building (200 Main Street; c.1860-1870; SPE.239) is one of only a handful of factory buildings still standing. The building continued to operate as a shoe factory into the 1950s, but it was shuttered in 1954.⁶⁰Fiske, 88. It was then used as a lumber company for many years and has recently been renovated and now offers commercial space for lease. The U-shaped building is not particularly large as factory buildings go, but its position on the slope of the hill close to the street makes it look much bigger when viewing it from the west. The building appears on the 1870 map of Spencer as “Jones & Starr Boot Mfty,” along the south side of Main Street to the west of the Draper estate, before Linden Street existed. Linden Street appears on the 1884 map and “E. Jones & Co. Boot Mfg.” is located on the southeast corner of Main Street and Linden Street on the map. It was stilled called “E. Jones Boot & Shoe Mf’rs” on the 1898 map of Spencer, but in 1917, long after the death of Erastus Jones in 1907, the declining factory was purchased by the Allen-Squires Company Shoe Factory, as it was called on the 1922 Sanborn map (Plate 6).⁶¹Fiske, 87.

The Jones factory building also looms over the elegant but sadly decaying and seemingly abandoned Universalist Church (8 Linden Street; 1882; SPE.17, see photo below) behind it on Linden Street. This lovely brick Romanesque-style building was designed by the noted architect Stephen C. Earle, whose work we previously encountered in Leicester and in Worcester. The Universalist church, as well as the Baptist church, which was located on the putative site of the Bemis Tavern as discussed above, were the earliest religious groups to break away from Congregationalism in Spencer. Although there were rumblings almost from the establishment of the parish of West Leicester against the monopoly of the Congregational Church, it was not until the retirement of Reverend Joseph Pope in 1818 that efforts succeeded in forming, first a Baptist congregation in North Spencer, followed by the withdrawal of about forty members of the Congregational Church, who joined the Universalist Society of Charlton and Brookfield beginning in 1820.⁶²Temple, 637. The Universalists eventually formed their own congregation in Spencer and built a church in the lower village in 1830, visible in the engraving by John Warner Barber above. The congregation shrank over time, and the church was closed in 1840 and replaced by a boot factory. A resurgence of Universalism in the decades after the Civil War resulted in the construction of the building on Linden Street, but this effort also failed and the church was sold in 1936 and became the offices of the neighboring shoe company.⁶³Fiske, 282. On one trip past the building in 2024 the front of the building was covered in opportunistic vegetation and some of the windows were broken, but on a recent visit the property had been spruced up, perhaps in connection with the renovation of the former factory building next door.

Like the Universalists, the early breakaway Baptist church did not thrive either. A church was established in North Spencer, but by the 1870s it had been converted into a barn. A post-Civil War resurgence in the congregation similar to that of the Universalists, resulted in the construction of the new church described above on the corner of Ash Street and Main Street. Again, like the nearby Universalist congregation, the second effort failed to thrive and the building was taken down in 1939.⁶⁴Fiske, 279.

A third breakaway group, the Methodists, also got off to a halting start, but by 1840 had grown large enough to officially organize. In 1847 a church was built at what is now 161 Main Street, which was remodeled in 1872, and which burned down in 1943. The church was rebuilt, but the congregation dwindled, and the church building today is now occupied by the Vietnamese Christian Church of Worcester.⁶⁵Fiske, 257-262.

Sandwiched in between the various churches were the residences and factories of the boot manufacturers who created most of the nineteenth century streetscape that gives Main Street in Spencer its distinctive look. The Reverend Levi Packard (1793-1857), the fourth minister of the Congregational Church in Spencer (the third minister, Stephen Crosby, was dismissed after seven years), lived in a parsonage built for him on the north side of Main Street, just west of the property of William Pope, which can be seen on Baldwin’s 1834 map (“Rev. L. Packard”; see map in beginning of this entry). Packard served as minister from 1826 until he departed for Rhode Island in 1853.⁶⁶Hurd, 639-640. His property was purchased in 1855 by Isaac Prouty (1798-1872), another member of the Prouty family and another successful shoe manufacturer, who lived in the house and a built a factory on the property.⁶⁷Hurd, 661. Isaac Prouty’s factory became the single largest shoe manufacturer in Spencer, and the original factory, visible on the 1857 and the 1870 maps just east of the Methodist Church, was superseded by an even larger building a short distance down Main Street, which will be discussed in the next entry. Today a funeral home is located in the Queen Anne-style house (163 Main Street; 1888; SPE.234) that replaced the factory and the old parsonage, built by Isaac’s son Jason Prouty, another member of the large family about which Temple mused, “No family name in Spencer is so common and none embraces so great a number of people as that of Prouty.”⁶⁸Hurd, 660. The older factory and house are visible on the 1884 map of the area (“Jason W. Prouty”) but a different structure is shown on the 1898 map (“JL Prouty,” the L is probably a mistake).

The American Legion building, the neighboring building to the east of the Jason Prouty House, on the northwest corner of Grove Street and Main Street (175 Main Street; 1851; SPE.235) was the home of David Prouty, the namesake of the high school. Prouty died in 1892 and left the house to yet another Prouty relative, Mary E. Prouty, who lived in the house until her death in 1908.⁶⁹Fiske, 323-324. On the 1898 map of the area, the house is listed as the property of “M.E. Prouty.” By 1922, as seen on the Sanborn Insurance map of that year, the building was already occupied by the American Legion.

Other successful manufacturers also once lived in pleasant Greek Revival and Italianate houses along the south side of Main Street in the blocks leading downhill. Across the street from the David Prouty House/American Legion building is the house of Charles E. Denny (188 Main Street; 1844; SPE.133), a building which, like virtually every building in this area, has also been converted to commercial space. The next house east along the south side of Main Street is the Erastus Jones House (186 Main Street; 1845; SPE.132), which today is the home of E.C. House Cleaning Services. The Asa T. Jones House (182 Main Street; 1856; SPE.130) once stood next door, but Fiske records that the house “was recently torn down to provide a parking lot for the Spencer Savings Bank,” and indeed there is a large parking lot next door to a charmless 1980s-era bank at 176 Main Street.⁷⁰Fiske, 257. One more former nineteenth-century residence still stands in this area, across Main Street (159 Main Street; 1820; SPE.232), wedged between the Vietnamese church and Spencer Town Hall, but it too is occupied by the office of a certified public accountant. No additional information is given in the historic report about the history of the building, but it seems unlikely to date to 1820, as there are no buildings shown on the north side of Main Street between the house of Rev. Levi Packard and the Mason Tavern in the lower village (about which more in the next entry) on Baldwin’s map of 1834. On Walling’s 1857 map there are a pair of houses owned by “L. Bemis” between the “Methodist Ch.” and the “Town Hall,” and on the 1870, 1884, and 1898 maps the property has numerous structures on it and was owned by Abraham Capen and other members of the Capen family. The expansion of the new Town Hall in the 1920s resulted in the loss of some of the property, and only the small building housing the offices of Canselmo C.P.A., LLC. remains. Downtown living no longer appears to be an option in Spencer.

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Separation of Church and State

Despite the conversion to commercial purposes of so many of the old residences along Main Street west of the First Congregational Church, it is only at the junction of Maple Street and Main Street that it truly feels like I have reached “Downtown” Spencer. From this point the buildings are mostly large civic or commercial structures. A particularly outstanding example is the large brick Italianate-style Spencer National Bank (172-174 Main Street; 1875; SPE.244). The Spencer National Bank was formed from an earlier smaller bank that was housed in the Erastus Jones factory up the street.⁷¹Hurd, 656. In 1875 the new bank was opened in the spacious and elegant new building directly opposite Town Hall. The president of the new bank was Erastus Jones. Some version of the bank remained in the building until the 1950s when a new building was erected next door. This newer building was razed in the 1970s and replaced by the current ugly building and parking lot next door. The contrast between the two buildings could not more stark. The original bank building housed the Masons beginning in 1926, and the building was purchased in 1970 by William Ekleberry, who seems to have owned every interesting building in Spencer at some point.⁷²Fiske, 479-482. Today the building seems sadly under-occupied and in need of restoration, but the exterior remains one of the more outstanding buildings in Spencer.

Directly across the street from the Bank Block is Spencer Memorial Town Hall (see photo at the beginning of this entry). In the first century of the existence of what would become the town of Spencer, from 1744 until 1838, all meetings related to town business were held in the meeting house up the hill.⁷³Fiske, 466. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, as the town of Spencer increased in population and as various new religious organizations were formed, the link between the town and the Congregational Church frayed. A building specifically dedicated to town business became a necessity, and “in 1839, the town erected a handsome building for the transaction of the municipal and other public business.”⁷⁴Draper, 121. By the 1870s the first town hall was deemed too small, and a new building replaced the earlier building in 1872. This building burned down in 1926 and was in turn replaced by the current Colonial Revival-style building, which opened in 1928.⁷⁵Fiske, 472.

Main Street curves slightly for the final hundred yards from Spencer Memorial Town Hall down into the lower village, the commercial center of Spencer. The Richard Sugden Library, the last of the significant institutional structures built in the nineteenth century with donations from wealthy manufacturers and businessmen, is located just off Main Street along Pleasant Street. There are numerous large commercial buildings and a wealth of history connected to the Upper Boston Post Road in this part of town. As this entry has very likely already exceeded both the reader’s capacity for attention and my feeble attempts at limiting the length of these entries, I will stop at this convenient end-point, bookending the entry with institutional buildings: the David Prouty High School at the eastern end and the Spencer Memorial Town Hall at the western end. In the next entry, the presence of not one, but three taverns in this area in the eighteenth century will return the focus of this project to the subject of foremost interest, the history and record of travelers along the Upper Boston Post Road, and it will examine, through their own diary entries, the visits to Spencer of two illustrious eighteenth-century figures, George Washington, and Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville. There will also be more discussion of shoe manufacturing for those who cannot get enough of that topic!

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Distance traveled in this entry along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road: 0.85 miles.

Total Distance traveled thus far along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road from Worcester Courthouse to Springfield “Meeting House” (ten entries): 11.8 miles.

Total Distance traveled along the original route of the road from the Old State House in Boston for this project: 58.6 miles.

Total Distance covered for all the walks described in Boston Rambles: 120.1 miles.