Spencer, Massachusetts, #3.

A Faithful Walk through the Interior

Part Three– The Center Cannot Hold

Upper Boston Post Road #25 (UBPR #25)

A CVS pharmacy in the center of Spencer, Massachusetts (behind the sign) *is located on the site* that was once occupied by a well-known eighteenth-century tavern and, subsequently, by a famous hotel. Both the Jenks Tavern and the Massasoit Hotel were destroyed by fire, as the commemorative sign above explains.

“Continued on to Spencer, 10 miles further, through pretty good roads, and lodged at the House of one Jenks, who keeps a pretty good Tavern.”

Diary of George Washington, October 22, 1789.

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“πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει”

Translated: “All is flux, nothing is stationary”

Heraclitus, c. 500 B.C. (quoted by Plato, in Cratylus, 402a.)¹

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“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919

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Introduction.

The Town of Spencer Official Zoning Map, adopted November 16, 2006, shows an area along Main Street from Grove Street in the east to High Street in the west, in bright pink, a color which is defined as “Town Center-Mixed Use.”² In the previous entry I described my walk along Main Street from Paxton Road in the eastern part of town to Spencer Memorial Town Hall, noting the gradual transition of the buildings along the road from residential to commercial use as I moved further west. Many of the buildings along Main Street west of Grove Street to Town Hall at Maple Street, primarily built as residences in the nineteenth century, have long since been converted into commercial buildings, which correlates with the contemporary zoning map.

West of Spencer Memorial Town Hall to High Street, nearly all the buildings along Main Street are primarily non-residential in character; even the oldest buildings were built for commerce or for manufacturing. The short distance along Main Street from Town Hall west to High Street, about 1,000 feet or 0.2 miles, has been the commercial center almost since the earliest days of the settlement of the town of Spencer. In the late eighteenth century there were three prominent taverns located in this short stretch of the Upper Boston Post Road, catering to the numerous travelers passing along what was once the main road west from Boston to Springfield and on to Hartford and, eventually, to New York. One or two illustrious travelers, including President George Washington, even left a record of his visit to Spencer.

This entry, part of a series of essays describing my walk west from Boston along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road, will examine the evolution of Spencer Center from traveler’s hub to manufacturing center to its somewhat frayed current state. The first part of this entry will examine travel along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road in the eighteenth century, with a focus on the taverns in Spencer Center and some of the prominent visitors who patronized these establishments and left a record of their visits. The second part of this entry will look at the structures that remain along this short section of the road. None of the eighteenth-century buildings remain, and the town center streetscape remains one characterized predominantly by nineteenth-century commercial and manufacturing buildings. As I walk through the center of Spencer I will discuss the development of Spencer into a major boot and shoe manufacturing town as well as the subsequent decline of the industry and its effects on the town center as seen from the vantage point of a modern traveler along the old road.

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Part One. Traveling Times.

View of Spencer Center. This photo shows the view west along Main Street from the southwest corner of Maple Street and Main Street, across the street from Spencer Memorial Town Hall (not shown), where the walk described in this entry begins. The walk ends a short distance away, at the intersection of High Street and Main Street, at the white house in the distance that was once the site of the Livermore Tavern, one of three taverns that were located here in the eighteenth century.

On August 15, 1698, Judge Samuel Sewall (1652-1730) left Boston and “set out for Springfield,” where he was to hold court in Hampshire County.³ On the first day of travel he reached “Marlborow” where he “lodged,” as he recorded in his diary. On the second day, August 16, Sewall traveled from Marlborough “to Quaboag, with a guard of 20 men under Cornel [Colonel?] Brown. Between Worcester and Quaboag we were greatly wet with rain; wet to the skin. Got thither before twas dark.” Quaboag was the early name for the town of Brookfield, which will be the subject of the entries along the Upper Boston Post Road after Spencer. Neither Spencer nor Leicester had been settled yet, and Worcester’s early settlement had been abandoned during King Philip’s War and had yet to be reestablished.

The distance from Boston to Marlborough along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road was about thirty miles. The distance from Marlborough to Sewall’s stopping point in “Quaboag,” likely in what is now West Brookfield, was about thirty-eight miles, an even longer day but a necessary one, as there were no taverns or even houses along the way in what was still contested country, as evidenced by the accompanying guard of twenty men. Sewall continued the next day, August 17, 1698, along the final leg of the journey, also under guard, to arrive in Springfield, a distance of twenty-nine miles from West Brookfield, for a total of ninety-seven miles in three days from Boston. That this was a difficult journey was attested to by Sewall himself, who wrote in his diary entry for August 3, 1700: “Between 3 and 4 I receiv’d & Letter from the Justices of Northamptonshire [an early name for Hampshire County], i.e. Partrig, Parsons, and Hawley to notify us that there is no Business requiring our going to Springfield this hot wether. We are very glad to be thus fairly discharged from this long and tedious journey.”⁴

The time it took Sewall to travel along the Upper Boston Post Road had not changed appreciably when he took essentially the same trip eighteen years later, in August 1716. Sewall stopped at Marlborough on the first day, August 27, and “got to Brookfield a little after sunset” on the second day. On the third day, August 29, 1716, Sewall continued “to Springfield. Were met by the Sheriff Hitchcock within about 10 Miles of the Town. Got thither about 5 p.m.” Sewall concluded this entry with the terse statement: “Augt. 30. Open’d the Court.”⁵ Spencer had still not been established, but Sewall did stop at both Worcester and Leicester (“Strawberry Hill”) for a meal and to rest his horse. He also did not travel under guard as he had eighteen years earlier, another sign of a slowly evolving road through what was still mostly wilderness. Although there had been changes along the road in the intervening years, the time it took to get from Boston to Springfield was effectively the same in 1716 as it had been in 1698.

Sewall did a reverse circuit in September 1718, traveling to Bristol (now in Rhode Island) then through Connecticut to Springfield. When he returned from Springfield to Boston, he stopped again for the night in Brookfield, then in Marlborough, with breaks for food and to rest the horses at “Strawberry Hill,” in Worcester, in Sudbury, and in Watertown, before reaching his home in Boston on the third day.⁶ These are the earliest records I have examined which include specific dates and details allowing a calculation of the rate and quality of travel along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road. The 97-mile trip from Boston to Springfield essentially required three days of travel, with overnight stops in Marlborough and Brookfield.

The Vade Mecum for America (1732), an early “companion for traders and travellers” as it was subtitled by its author Thomas Prince (1687-1758), listed many of the roads and taverns in the colonies, with especially detailed lists for the roads leading out from Boston, where Prince lived and worked (he was also minister for the Old South Meeting House).⁷ Prince lists Richardson’s Tavern in Leicester (the tavern that would later be called Swan’s) fifty miles from the Town House in Boston along the “road from Boston westward thro’ Worcester to Springfield on Connecticut River.” Prince’s math was off by about three or four miles from Worcester west to Springfield, as I have discussed in previous entries (the math of many later almanacs was little better as we shall soon see), but the order of taverns along the road is consistent with other sources of information available from the period, and the list is one of the earliest efforts to provide the names of taverns, the towns in which they are located, and the relative distances between taverns along the roads in the American colonies. The next tavern listed along the road is “Merricks” in Brookfield, fourteen miles west of Richardson’s, and sixty-four miles from Boston. In other words, there is no tavern listed for Spencer, as the town was not established until 1744 (as Leicester West Parish) and did not become known as Spencer until the 1750s. Although Leicester was now an established town and the traveler had more options along the route between Marlborough and Brookfield than had existed thirty years earlier, there was still a long gap between taverns on the road from Leicester to Brookfield, a section of the road that was not the easiest to travel. George Washington (1732-1799), traveling along the Upper Boston Post Road from New York to Boston more than fifty years later, in 1789, noted in his diary that “a good part of the Road from Spencer to Worcester is Hilly, and except a little nearest the latter, very stoney.”⁸

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Detail of the map of Spencer produced in 1795 for the official survey of Massachusetts, showing the route of the “Post Road to Boston,” which passes from east to west for about 4.5 miles through the middle of the town. The only building shown on the map is the “Meeting house,” discussed in the previous entry. Not shown are the three taverns that existed in Spencer Center at the time. One of these taverns, the Mason Tavern, was located near the first “bridge” (the one shown on the map immediately to the left of the meeting house), while the other two taverns, the Jenks Tavern, and the Livermore Tavern, were located nearby a few yards west of the Mason House. The bridge over what was called “Moose Pond Brook” on Baldwin’s 1834 map (see below) and is called Cider Mill Brook today is the first of three bridges in Spencer along the Upper Boston Post Road shown on the map above. The second bridge, which again crosses Moose Pond Brook as it turns north to flow into the Seven Mile River, was located on Olde Main Street near what today is the junction with Main Street and will be discussed in the next entry as will the third bridge on the far left of the map over the Seven Mile River.

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Forty years after the publication of the Vade Mecum and more than fifty years after Sewall’s last recorded trip along the Upper Boston Post Road, John Adams (1735-1826) departed from Boston on May 30, 1771, and traveled along the same road en route to Stafford Springs in Connecticut. The town of Spencer is mentioned, albeit briefly, in his diary entry for June 3, 1771: “oated in Spencer,” that is to say he stopped to feed his horse. Adams’s trip from Boston was complicated by the fact that he stopped along the way to visit acquaintances in Worcester, where he had studied law years before, but he did travel, in one very long day, from Worcester to Spencer and on to Brookfield and to Warren, before turning south off the Upper Boston Post Road to reach Stafford Springs (about 45 miles from Worcester on the route he followed).⁹ On his return trip, Adams left Stafford Springs on June 12, 1771, stopping for food and to rest in Brimfield and in Warren (called “Western” at the time), and again “oated at Spencer,” and stopped for the night at “Serjeants in Leicester,” a tavern I discussed in the first of my three entries describing my walk through Leicester, the town bordering Spencer to the east. Adams continued his journey east the following morning, stopping briefly in Worcester, and apparently reaching Boston the same day, quite a long journey of around 53 miles on horseback; that said, he did travel on one of the longest days of the year in decent weather.

Adams took a more consequential trip along the Upper Boston Post Road in 1774, en route to Philadelphia as one of four delegates chosen to represent Massachusetts at the First Continental Congress. Adams and his fellow delegates departed from Boston on August 10, 1774, stopping at Coolidge’s in Watertown for a farewell luncheon and staying at Buckminster’s Tavern in Framingham the first night.¹⁰ Although Adams failed to record diary entries for the next three days of the trip, his fellow delegate Robert Treat Paine did record details of the route west.¹¹ Paine was reported to have noted that, according to a summary footnote by the editors of Adams’s papers for the diary entry cited above, “the party set out at 5 in the morning of the 11th, breakfasted at Westborough, and proceeded through Worcester, dining ‘in good season,’ and then on to Spencer, where they lodged. On the 12th they again started at 5, breakfasted at Brookfield, dined at Palmer, and lodged at Springfield. They did not leave Springfield until 10 the next morning, dined at Suffield, and lodged at Hartford, the weather remaining ‘hot and very dry and dusty.’ The 14th being a Sunday, they went to meeting and rested.”

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Detail from a map of Spencer produced in 1834 by local surveyor William Baldwin, showing the route of the “Post Road from Boston to Hartford,” *today’s Main Street,* through what was once called the “lower village” of Spencer, Massachusetts. The section shown in the map above begins at the intersection of Main Street and Maple Street (the road at right heading south from the east-west road in the map above), then continues west through what today is Spencer Town Center (today’s Pleasant Street is the road heading north), and ends roughly where the junction of West Main Street and Olde Main Street is located today (West Main Street does not appear on maps of Spencer until 1870). The building labeled “Draper’s Inn” was the building operated as Jenks Tavern in 1788 and 1789 when Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville and George Washington respectively spent the night and described the tavern in their diaries. Also shown on the map is the house of “J. Mason,” which was once Mason’s Tavern, and the house labeled “D. Capen,” which was once the Livermore Tavern, parts of which might still exist in the house at 1 High Street. Also note “Moose Pond Brook,” which passes through the center of Spencer and then crosses the road again near the West Main Street/Olde Main Street junction, before joining the Seven Mile River.

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No mention is made of the specific tavern at which the delegates lodged, nor can I find any hints in the local histories of Spencer, but it seems likely that it was one of the taverns in Spencer Center. It is worth noting, however, that Spencer is the town at which the delegates stopped on their second night, before proceeding to Springfield. This is the earliest record I have found of a traveler stopping for the night in Spencer. It is not the last record, as Spencer increasingly became a convenient stopping point on the way to Springfield. Adams himself stopped in town on his return from Philadelphia in November 1774. Adams and his fellow travelers stayed all day in Palmer (also called Kingston at the time) on Sunday, November 6, 1774, then continued on through Brookfield on Monday, November 7 and “Lodged at Hunts in Spencer.” The next morning the group continued on to Buckminster’s in Framingham once again, before reaching Boston on November 9, 1774.

Nowhere in any of the local histories of Spencer can I find a mention of a tavern operated by a man named Hunt. James Draper, who wrote a history of the town in 1860, mentions an Aaron Hunt, who moved to Spencer “from Paxton about 1770…[He was] a man of some education, taught school, and was selectman in 1778 and 1779.” Draper also writes that “he and his wife died in Oakham” but does not say whether Hunt operated a tavern.¹² It is possible that Hunt operated the tavern later run by Isaac Jenks, but there is no direct evidence for this. Thus I am left with a tantalizing but unresolved reference to a Hunt’s tavern in Spencer in 1774. Adams recorded one more trip to Philadelphia in 1776, but his penchant for stopping in Worcester meant he skipped a stop in Spencer upon resuming his journey and instead stopped in Brookfield.

The distance traveled by Adams and his companions from Spencer to Springfield on the way to Philadelphia was about thirty-seven miles, and on the return trip was about twenty-three miles from Palmer to Spencer along the Upper Boston Post Road, and about thirty-four miles from Spencer to Framingham. The party traveled along the Upper Boston Post Road from Spencer to Northborough and then turned south to follow the Framingham Road through Westborough and Southborough to reach Buckminster’s Tavern (this road was discussed in great detail in earlier entries on each of the above-mentioned towns). Ebeneezer Parkman (1703-1782), longtime minister for the town of Westborough, frequently traveled along this same route from his house to Brookfield to visit family or to preach in place of a fellow minister or to attend meetings of area ministers. His trip from Westborough to Brookfield, a distance of about thirty miles, was usually accomplished in a single day, but he frequently stopped to visit the ministers along the way, and occasionally stopped in Spencer at the house of Joshua Eaton, the first minister of the church in Spencer (discussed in the last entry). Thus, although Parkman does mention Spencer frequently in his diary entries, he does not mention any of the taverns in Spencer.

Parkman’s travel time of approximately thirty miles a day and Adams’s travel times of 20-40 miles per day, were not appreciably different from Sewall’s travel times along the road nearly eighty years earlier. The time it took to travel the road at the time of the American Revolution was essentially the same as it had been in the late seventeenth century, when the road passed mostly through land sparsely settled by Europeans. The Founders Online website, an excellent resource which has transcripts of letters and diaries of many of the founding fathers, includes a letter from George Washington to John Hancock, dated July 10-11, 1775, which details his arrival in Cambridge, Massachusetts to take command of the newly-formed Continental Army. A footnote by the editors details the journey Washington and his companions made from Springfield to Cambridge: “On 1 July a number of gentlemen from Springfield accompanied the generals to Brookfield, Mass., and another group of gentlemen conducted them to Marlborough, Massachusetts. A troop of horsemen from Marlborough provided an escort on 2 July for the last leg of the journey to Cambridge.” Thus, it appears Washington traveled a remarkable sixty-six miles from Springfield to Marlborough in a single day! It seems slightly odd that Washington traveled an average of about thirty miles a day from New York before reaching Springfield on June 30, after which he continued directly to Marlborough from Springfield on July 1, but perhaps the exigency of Washington’s mission forced the pace of the journey. Regardless, sixty-six miles traveled in one day was a remarkably long journey along the Post Road in the eighteenth century.

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Washington (and others) Slept Here.

Washington traveled the same route from New York to Boston fourteen years later, in the fall of 1789, this time as the newly-elected first President of the United States. The goal of the trip was to pay an official visit to each of the now-united former thirteen colonies (although he skipped Rhode Island on this journey as the state had yet to ratify the Constitution, returning a few months later, by sea, to visit Newport). Washington recorded the details of his visit in his diary, usually with the briefest of details, but occasionally giving us glimpses of his mood and of the people and places he encountered along the road. On Thursday, October 22, 1789, Washington “set out at 7 o’clock” from Springfield, passed through Palmer and Brookfield, which he described in some detail, before he “continued on to Spencer, 10 miles further, through pretty good roads, and lodged at the House of one Jenks, who keeps a pretty good Tavern.”¹³ Unfortunately, that is the sum total of his discussion of Spencer, although getting a “pretty good” review from George Washington is probably worth more than most of the five-star reviews on Trip Advisor!

Isaac Jenks and his tavern, perhaps unsurprisingly, take up quite a few pages of the local histories of Spencer, almost entirely because of Washington’s positive review. There is also a stone marker (see photo above) marking the location of the tavern at the northwest corner of Main Street and Pleasant Street, right in the center of Spencer. According to town historian James Draper, describing the town as it appeared in 1788 “there were then but three dwelling houses in what was once the lower village, and these three stood in juxtaposition, and were all taverns: the house kept by Captain Ebenezer Mason, lately owned by his grandson Joseph Mason, the house then kept by Mr. Isaac Jenks, and now owned by William C. Watson, and the house occupied by Mr. James Livermore, on the site of Col. Temple’s. These have irreverently been compared to the three taverns alluded to by St. Paul, when he ‘thanked God and took courage.'”¹⁴ Before we return to the Mason and the Livermore taverns, we will first examine the tavern operated by Isaac Jenks.

According to Draper, “Isaac Jenks came to Spencer about 1775 and kept the public house known as the Jenks Tavern.”¹⁵ J.W. Temple, another local historian, writes that “In 1743, Josiah Robinson built a small dwelling upon lot No. 22, which was purchased in 1754 by one John Flagg and kept by him as a public-house for seven years. In 1775 Isaac Jenks became owner of the property and the house was ever afterward known as the Jenks Tavern, and was the most famous of all the inns in Spencer with the traveling public.”¹⁶ Draper claimed that Robinson “built a house which now constitutes the eastern half part of the Jenks Tavern,” the tavern still existing when Draper wrote his history of Spencer in 1860.¹⁷ Jenks died in 1818 and Eleazar Draper “kept the Jenks Tavern” until his death in 1849.¹⁸ “Draper’s Inn” is prominently labeled on William Baldwin’s 1834 map of Spencer (see map above) on the northwest corner of Main Street and Pleasant Street. On Walling’s 1857 map the building was shown as “W.C. Watson’s Hotel,” just as James Draper stated in 1860 (see above quote). Although the “Watson Hotel” appeared on the map of Spencer from 1870 in Beer’s Atlas of Worcester County (Plate 61), the building was “destroyed by fire September 20, 1870.”¹⁹

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Detail from Henry Walling’s 1857 map of Spencer Center. Town Hall, where the walk described in this entry begins, is located along Main Street at far right, labeled “Town House.” Also visible along Main Street are the houses of “J. Mason” and “A. Temple,” as well as “W.C. Watson’s Hotel,” the “three taverns” of the “lower village” in eighteenth-century Spencer. The house of “C. Sumner,” at far left, is the location today of the junction of Olde Main Street and West Main Street. Compare with the map above from 1834 to observe the changes to the center in a little over two decades.

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Another prominent guest spent the night of August 9, 1788 at the Jenks Tavern in Spencer and also left a favorable review. Jacques Pierre Brissot (he later appended “de Warville,” an anglicized version of the town of Ouarville where his mother owned property, to his name) was a prominent French writer and abolitionist who visited the United States in 1788 as an agent and secretary of the newly-formed Société des amis des Noirs; he also later served as the society’s president. His mission was primarily to promote the end of slavery and he met abolitionists and politicians in the newly-formed United States, but he was also an admirer of the American Revolution and even contemplated emigrating to the United States with his family. Circumstances in France changed after his return in January 1789, and Brissot became a prominent supporter of and a major figure in the ensuing French Revolution, leading the Girondins in the Assembly, a relatively moderate faction opposed to the more radical Montagnards, led by Maximilien Robespierre, which ultimately led to Brissot’s execution on October 31, 1793, at the height of the Reign of Terror.

Five years earlier, on August 9, 1788, Brissot de Warville wrote in his diary (which was later published as a short pamphlet), about his “Journey from Boston to New-York, by land. The distance of these towns is about two hundred and fifty miles. Many persons have united in establishing a kind of diligence, or public stage, which passes regularly for the convenience of travellers. In the summer season, the journey is performed in four days. We set out from Boston at four o’clock in the morning…We slept the first night at Spencer, a new village in the midst of the woods.”²⁰ Brissot de Warville was quite enamored of Spencer and of the tavern in which he spent the night and continued his vivid description, comparing his stay in Spencer quite favorably to taverns in France:

The house of the tavern was but half built; but the part that was finished, had an air of cleanliness which pleases, because it announces that degree of competence, those moral and delicate habits, which are never seen in our villages. The chambers were neat, the beds good, the sheets clean, supper passable; cyder, tea, punch, and all for fourteen pence a head. There were four of us. Now, compare, my friend, this order of things with what you have a thousand times seen in our French taverns—chambers dirty and hideous, beds infected with bugs, those insects which Sterne calls the rightful inhabitants of taverns, if indeed long possession gives a right; sheets ill-washed, and exhaling a fedit odour; bad covering, wine adulterated, and every thing at its weight in gold; greedy servants, who are complaisant only in proportion to your equipage; grovelling towards a rich traveller, and insolent towards him whom they suspect of mediocrity. Such are the eternal torments of travellers in France: add to this, the fear of being robbed, the precautions necessary to be taken every night to prevent it; while, in the United States, you travel without fear, as without arms,* (footnote—I traveled with a Frenchman, who, thinking he had much to fear in a savage country, had furnished himself with pistols. The good American smiled at his precautions, and advised him to put his pistols in his trunk; he had wit enough to believe him). and you sleep quietly among the woods, in an open chamber of a house whose doors shut without locks. And now judge which country merits the name of civilized, and which bears the aspect of the greatest general happiness.²¹

Brissot de Warville’s charming naivete about the role of firearms in American society notwithstanding, his romantic portrait of life “among the woods” is among the more positive reviews I have seen of taverns along the Post Road (both the Lower and Upper Post Roads). Although Brissot de Warville neglected to mention the name of the tavern, Draper tells us that, “this tavern house in Spencer, half built, ‘situated in a new village in the midst of the woods,’ was none other than the Jenks tavern, which was at that time being repaired, and an addition being erected on the west side, and not completed.”²² The tavern served in 1788 as the first night’s stop along the stage coach route from Boston to New York, which had been established by Levi Pease in 1783 (see my entry on Shrewsbury for more about Levi Pease). The first coaches made the trip from Boston to Hartford in four days, stopping the first night in Northborough or Shrewsbury, and the second night in Brookfield or Spencer, depending upon the weather. The passengers then boarded the Hartford-to-New York stage, which took another three days to reach New York. However, the duration of the trip was constantly shortened through improvements in the coaches and more frequent changes of horses. By November 1784 passengers stopped the first night in Worcester and reached Hartford in three days, and New York in six days.

Brissot de Warville’s trip to New York in 1788 took four very long days, starting each day’s ride at four in the morning and ending each evening well after dark, but it was clear to him that the pace was somewhat reckless; writing of his stop for dinner in Worcester on the first day of travel, he expresses his concern for the welfare of the horses: “The tavern, where we had a good American dinner, is a charming house of wood, well ornamented; it is kept by Mr. Pease, one of the proprietors of the Boston stage. He has much merit for his activity and industry; but it is to be hoped he will change the present plan, so far as it respects his horses: they are over-done with the length and difficulty of the courses, which ruins them in a short time, besides retarding very much the progress.”²³

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Tavern Town.

Milestone #59 (incorrectly labeled “57 miles” on the accompanying sign), Spencer, Massachusetts. The stone, which reads “59 Mile from Boston,” stands in front of the site of Mason’s Tavern, one of three taverns located in Spencer Center in the eighteenth century.

Thus, by 1788, Spencer could be reached in one very long day on the stagecoach, making it a convenient first night’s stop, fifty-nine miles west of Boston along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road. This development is no doubt the reason that, in the late eighteenth century, the center of Spencer hosted not one, but three taverns. In addition to the Jenks Tavern at the northwest corner of Main Street and Pleasant Street, there was a second tavern four hundred feet east along Main Street, the “Mason House, kept by Ebenezer Mason, [which] stood on the north side of Main Street where the parking lot for the shopping center is now located. It was razed in the summer of 1938 by W. G. Farquaharson for the owner, J. Baker. The property had been unoccupied for some time when it was taken down.”²⁴

The Mason Tavern was located almost exactly halfway between the site of the Jenks Tavern, today commemorated by a stone marker near the benches at the corner of Pleasant and Main Street (see earlier photo above), and Spencer Memorial Town Hall. Today, along the sidewalk in front of the site of the Mason Tavern, is found what is very likely the oldest artifact along the Upper Boston Post Road in Spencer Center, the red sandstone marker reading “59 Mile from Boston.”²⁵ The map of Spencer produced in 1795 as part of the official survey of Massachusetts (see the first map above at the beginning of this entry) notes that “this plan was taken of Spencer in October A.D. 1795. Distan(ce) 59 miles from Boston and 12 miles distant from the Court House in Worcester.” The 1788 Almanack published by Samuel Stearns lists Mason’s Tavern in Spencer (p.23) as four miles distant from the preceding tavern, Bruce’s in Leicester, and five miles away from the Swan Tavern in Leicester Center; adding up the distances between taverns listed by Stearns along the “Western Post Road,” Mason’s Tavern in Spencer would have been located fifty-nine miles distant from the Town House in Boston.

The survival of this milestone (SPE.908 in the MACRIS database) was by no means guaranteed, as Henry Tower, another historian of Spencer explained: “When the Great Post Road through Spencer was resurveyed and in many places straightened and rebuilt by the county in 1856, a large quantity of land and rock was taken from the north side of the road near the late Calvin Kent house and dumped in the valley below, from Mechanic to Wall streets. This raised the road in some places some six feet and in the filling-in process the milestone became buried out of sight. Some years afterward Jeremiah Grout, a public-spirited citizen living near by, determined to resurrect the stone and did so, employing to do the work one John Hart, a Frenchman, long in his service as a gardener and general all-around out-doors workman. Soon after the stone was once more in position as a marker of distance.”²⁶ Just west of the house of “J. Mason” on the 1834 and on the 1857 maps shown above is the neighboring house of “J. Grout.” Although the Mason House was razed in 1938 as described above, it comes as something of a shock to discover that the Jeremiah Grout House still exists and is one of the few structures originally built as a residence remaining in the original Spencer Town Center Historic District (SPE.N). The Greek Revival building at 125 Main Street (c. 1834; SPE.223), now a commercial space housing a hair and nail salon, is tucked into the small lot between the large and impressive Sugden Block (about which more shortly) and the large (and less impressive) parking lot for the shopping center. The Grout House appears to be the oldest building still standing in the historic district, based upon an examination of the dates of construction of each building listed in the report. I will come back to the Grout house and family in the next section exploring the development of Spencer Center in the nineteenth century.

An image taken from Henry Tower’s Historical Sketches Relating to Spencer, Massachusetts, Vol. I, p. 148 (1901). The undated photograph shows the house that served as the Mason Tavern in the late eighteenth century. The house was razed in 1938, and today the location is a parking lot for a shopping center on Main Street in Spencer Center. One of the “grand elms” described by Stephen Jenkins appears to be visible at the top left of the photograph.

The milestone’s location in front of Mason’s Tavern apparently is unusual; Mary and James Gage, authors of Milestones and Guideposts of Massachusetts and Southeastern New Hampshire state that “this is the only recorded milestone in front of a tavern on the Upper Post Road west from Worcester. There may have been more.”²⁷ I will certainly be on the lookout as I continue west along Upper Boston Post Road! The milestone is not visible in the undated image of the Mason House taken from Henry Tower’s 1901 book on Spencer (see photo at left), but there is a fence surrounding the utility pole in front of the house which could be blocking the stone from view, or it could have been located between the Mason House and the neighboring Grout House, which is not shown in the photograph.

Stephen Jenkins, who traveled the Upper Boston Post Road and published The Old Boston Post Road in 1913, describes the area around the Mason Tavern at the time he visited with an amusing anecdote: “There are many beautiful shade trees in the town, but one’s attention is attracted especially by the three grand elms near the corner of Maple and Mechanic streets [Jenkins presumably means Main Street, perhaps between Maple and Mechanic Streets], which were set out on June 17, 1775. This is the date of the Battle of Bunker Hill, and tradition says that while the men were at work setting out the trees, they heard the booming of the British guns. As the milestone under the trees reads, 59 miles to Boston, either the men had very acute hearing, or sound travelled farther in those days than in these.”²⁸ Although there are a few bushes near the milestone, there are no trees at all today along Main Street in Spencer Center; the nearest trees are on the lawn in front of Spencer Memorial Town Hall, and the elms likely died with the arrival in the United States of Dutch Elm disease in the mid-twentieth century.

Another twentieth-century writer and traveler along the Upper Boston Post Road was Stewart H. Holbrook who wrote, in his short section on the town of Spencer in The Old Post Road (1962), “in searching for a restaurant in Spencer, I also attempted to find an ancient milestone reading 59 Mi to Boston, said to stand at Maple and Mechanic Streets [he obviously copied the Jenkins error above], but failed.”²⁹ He must have been quite fatigued from hunger if he missed the milestone, as it is in roughly the same spot in which it apparently has been located for well over a century, likely for more than two centuries. Holbrook does not mention whether the elm trees remained in the early 1960s, but perhaps he was too hungry to notice.

*Knox Trail Marker, Spencer, Massachusetts.*

The Mason Tavern and the Jenks Tavern are listed in many of the almanacs published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, although the distances from Boston are not always accurate.³⁰ Weatherwise’s Town and Country Almanack, for the Year of our Lord 1786 lists Mason’s in Spencer as four miles from Swan’s in Leicester and fifty-eight miles from Boston. Low’s Almanack for 1787 lists Mason’s in Spencer as five miles from Swan’s in Leicester but as only fifty-six miles from Boston. Samuel Bullard’s 1790 almanac lists the Jenks Tavern in Spencer, five miles from Swan’s in Leicester and 61 miles from Boston, but omits Mason’s Tavern. In his 1791 almanac, Bickerstaff lists both the Jenks and the Mason taverns in Spencer as being the same slightly too long 61.5 miles distant from Boston. In 1795 Low lists the Spencer taverns as “Mason or Jenks,” five miles from Swan’s and only fifty-seven miles from Boston, but in his 1800 almanac he omits Mason’s Tavern while including Whitmore’s (discussed in the previous entry) along with the Jenks Tavern in Spencer. In Isiah Thomas’s 1802 Almanack the choice of Mason or Jenks is again offered for Spencer, both five miles from Hobart’s in Leicester but only 56.5 miles from Boston, although by this time bridges across the Charles River and early turnpike roads had shortened the distance out of Boston by a couple of miles, so this might have been an accurate calculation. The shortest distance today from the Old State House in Boston to the Spencer Shopper’s Village at 133 Main Street in Spencer, in front of which stands the stone reading 59 Mile From Boston, is 54.1 miles, according to Google Maps. The straight-line distance from the Old State House in Boston to the milestone in Spencer Center is 48.5 miles.

Captain Ebeneezer Mason (1732-1797), the owner of the tavern once located behind the milestone in Spencer Center reading “59 Mile From Boston,” also played a role in the American Revolution. On April 19, 1775 British soldiers and American minutemen exchanged fire at Lexington and Concord; according to local historian Jeffrey Fiske, “word reached Spencer a day later, and fifty-six men under Captain Ebenezer Mason immediately set out for Boston. Nine other Spencer men marched with a company from Leicester. Although they arrived too late to take part in any action, forty of the Spencer company enlisted in the new Continental Army for eight months. Many of these men later took part in the Battle of Bunker Hill.”³¹ A few feet west of the milestone, just past the Grout House, another stone marker in the sidewalk, similar to others I have encountered on my walks along the old road, commemorates the route followed by the men and animals, led by Colonel Henry Knox, who transported the “train of artillery” captured from Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York across Massachusetts in the winter of 1775-1776, ultimately to be placed on the hills surrounding Boston, which forced the evacuation of Boston by British troops on March 17, 1776.

Ebenezer Mason arrived in Spencer in 1764, according to James Draper, and “In 1774 he removed on to the central part of lot 22, where his grandson Joseph Mason lately lived. Capt. Mason carried on the business of a tanner, kept a public house several years, and was captain of the company who marched to Cambridge, April 19, 1775. He was a very respectable gentleman, was town clerk several years, and was a firm friend to government during the insurrection of Shays.”³² The Shays “insurrection” will appear in the following entry describing my walk along the Upper Boston Post Road in Spencer. As mentioned earlier, the house of “J. Mason” is visible on the 1834 and on the 1857 maps of Spencer. As a tanner, Ebenezer Mason’s house and tavern was in a useful location, as he was able to utilize the stream which passed directly by his house and crossed the Upper Boston Post Road in Spencer Center. The first bridge along the road (from east to west) on the 1795 map of Spencer (see map above) crosses what is referred to as “Moose Pond Brook” on Baldwin’s map of 1834 at a location which would have been almost directly in front of Mason’s Tavern. Unfortunately, the 1795 map does not show any of the taverns in Spencer. By the 1870s the house was owned by Isaac Prouty, as well as the land behind it, where he built a large shoe factory which also utilized the water from the brook, as we shall soon see.

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*Detail from the 1870* Atlas of Worcester County by F.W. Beers, Plate 61, showing the center of Spencer. The walk in this entry starts in front of Spencer Memorial Town Hall, the modern (1926) version of the the building on the right (in green) labelled the “Town House.” The walk ends at the house labelled “A. Temple” at the left of the map, once the site of the Livermore Tavern. Prominent buildings or lots on the map discussed in this entry include the “I. Prouty & Co. Boot Mfty,” on the site of the Mason Tavern, the Grout family property, now the Sugden Block and the Sugden Memorial Library, “Bush & Grout Boot Mfty,” and the “Watson Hotel,” and “Watson Residence,” now the site of a CVS pharmacy building and parking lot.

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The third of the trilogy of taverns in Spencer Center in the late eighteenth century was the Livermore Tavern. Curiously, this tavern is unmentioned in any of the almanacs from the period, nor have I found any mention of it by travelers who passed through Spencer. This tavern was located at the northwest corner of High Street and Main Street at the western end of Spencer Town Center. Today there is a prominent white house overlooking Main Street from its slightly elevated perch at the corner of High Street (visible in the photograph near the beginning of this entry of the view along Main Street as well as in the photo below). The original tavern building “may still exist as part of the present building at the corner of High and Main Streets,” according to Jeffrey Fiske.³³ The current house (1 High Street, c.1800 with significant alterations in 1856, SPE.194) acquired its Italianate-style appearance sometime around 1856 when it was owned by Alonzo Temple (1797-1883) and his wife Adeline (1802-1856). The house is described in the historic structure report advocating the extension of the western and northern boundaries of the original Spencer Town Center Historic District (SPE.N), which was certified in 2003 for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, as “the sole Federal era house in the boundary increase district. It is 2½ stories in height under a side-gable roof and faces east on a corner lot. It is five bays wide and two bays deep and has two rear ells of 2½ stories on the west. The house was greatly altered in the Italianate period.”³⁴ The report goes on to discuss the mid-nineteenth-century owner of the house: “Colonel Alonzo Temple was instrumental in the appearance of Spencer and contributed to the flexibility of its manufacturing facilities. Temple was an entrepreneur who at different times of his life was a laborer, business manager, carpenter, and real estate speculator. As carpenter and builder he was responsible for constructing the Methodist Church and several houses on Main Street, [including] the Temple House on High Street. Temple’s own house may incorporate part of the Federal Period Livermore Tavern, but its current exterior appearance is stylistically much later than the Federal Period.”³⁵ On Walling’s 1857 map of Spencer Center (see above) the house is owned by “A. Temple,” as it is on the 1870 map of the area by F.W. Beers (see map below). On the 1884 and the 1898 maps of the area the property is owned by “J.W. Temple,” the son of Alonzo and Adeline Temple.

The house at 1 High Street is located on the site of the Livermore Tavern, one of the three taverns located in Spencer Center in the eighteenth century. Part of the current house, built by and occupied by Alonzo Temple and his family, may incorporate elements of the original tavern. The Jenks Tavern burned down in 1870 and the Mason Tavern was razed in 1938.

It is also possible that the current house was built over the foundation of the original tavern. The historian Joseph Warren Temple (1833-1914), who wrote the Spencer chapter in Hurd’s History of Worcester County, noted all three taverns in his history of Spencer, including “the Livermore House, on the site of the residence of J.W. Temple.”³⁶ The fact that Temple, the son of Alonzo and Adeline Temple, lived in the house under discussion at the time he wrote the words “on the site of the residence” indicates that perhaps he was not convinced that the original tavern was part of the house which his father built. Draper, in his History of Spencer also writes that “the house occupied by James Livermore [was] on the site [Draper’s italics] of Col. Temple’s.”³⁷

Today, much of the area around the house is paved for parking and the house appears to be divided into several apartment units. Part of the gutter is collapsing and the building is a victim, like so many other historic structures along the Upper Boston Post Road, of what another historic structure report (SPE.O, which covered the area east of the Town Center) accurately termed “the unsympathetic application of new sidings,” but the house remains an elegant example of the residential buildings people like Alonzo Temple built in the nineteenth century, on the edge of a town center that was rapidly growing and evolving from its early role as a hub for travelers.

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The Widening Gyre.

The opening of the Stafford Turnpike in 1810 created a more direct route from Worcester to Hartford, Connecticut, and a large fraction of the stagecoach traffic shifted away from the Upper Boston Post Road west from Worcester onto the new road. However, the death knell to the taverns came with the arrival of the railroad in 1839. Emory Washburn, governor of Massachusetts, author of Historical Sketches of the Town of Leicester, Massachusetts (1860), and a promoter of the development of railroads, noted the effect of the railroad upon the Upper Boston Post Road: “The opening of this railroad wrought an entire revolution in the course of public travel through the town. It shortened the time of a passage to Boston from eight hours to three but it put an end to the lines of stage-coaches, which, two or three times a day, used to keep alive the attention of the villagers by their arrival and departure, and made the bar-room of the hotel, for a few moments every day, a kind of public exchange, where friends met to greet each other, news was told, politics discussed, and a free intercourse kept up with the outside world. Besides these, there was a large amount of travel through the town in pleasure-carriages, and especially by teams employed in transporting produce to Boston, and bringing supplies of goods for the country from that market.”³⁸ The station in Spencer was at first inconveniently located a couple of miles south of the center, but a branch line was opened that connected Spencer Center to the main line in 1879.³⁹ According to the Spencer Town Center Historic District Border Extension Report (SPE.R), “Joseph Warren Temple was instrumental in advocating for the branch.”⁴⁰

Today, the branch line is now a rail trail, and there is no direct passenger service to the town, although the Amtrak train to Springfield, Albany, and Chicago passes through the town along the original rail line. To reach Spencer by public transit from Boston to Spencer involves a commuter rail trip from Boston to Worcester, a short walk to the Worcester Regional Transit Authority (WRTA) Central Hub, followed by a trip on WRTA Bus #33 from Worcester to Spencer, mostly along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road. The most convenient trip involves catching the 6:56 a.m train from Back Bay Station in Boston, arriving at Worcester Union Station at 8:09 a.m., then walking five minutes to the bus platform and catching the 8:14 a.m. departure of Bus #33, which is scheduled to arrive in Spencer Center at 8:52 a.m. If the schedule works (and it is extremely tight!) it is possible to get from Boston to Spencer in about two hours. To reach Spencer from Boston by car involves a journey of about fifty-five miles and takes anywhere from one hour and fifteen minutes to one-and-a-half hours, assuming normal traffic flow. A trip to Spencer by bicycle is probably the closest approximation to a trip in the eighteenth century, the trip taking around five or six hours without stops. A walk from Boston to Spencer, a distance of fifty-nine miles along the original route of the Upper Boston Post Road, can be reasonably done in three days, with an overnight in Sudbury, and in Worcester, before walking the final twelve miles to Spencer on the third day. There is no tavern or hotel in the center of Spencer, or indeed in the entire town of Spencer. The nearest hotels are either in Worcester or near Massachusetts Turnpike exits in Auburn or in Sturbridge, all more than ten miles distant from Spencer Center.

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Part Two. Change is the Only Constant.⁴¹

The Sugden Block (1890) is the most prominent building along Main Street in Spencer Center. The Jeremiah Grout House (c. 1834) can be seen to the right of the Sugden Block. The Knox Trail memorial marker can also be seen on the sidewalk between the two buildings. Just behind the Sugden Block, on Pleasant Street, is the Richard Sugden Memorial Library.

With the notable exception of the milestone in front of Spencer Shopper’s Village and the various plaques and tablets marking the site of taverns or notable events, there is little evidence today that Spencer Center was once an important hub for travelers in the eighteenth century. According to the report on the eastward extension of the borders of the original Spencer Town Center National Register Historic District, produced in 1986 (SPE.O on the MACRIS website, discussed in the previous entry), “No buildings built prior to 1834 are known to exist in the former lower village.”⁴² The brief walk from Spencer Memorial Town Hall to High Street today is a walk through a mostly nineteenth-century architectural streetscape, past few buildings which serve their original purpose, some of which are in an advanced state of decay. The amount of activity in the center of Spencer today is a shadow of its former bustle, with few businesses and little foot traffic. The main commercial establishments, like the CVS building (more about this shortly) and the shopping center behind the milestone are, frankly, blights on the landscape and that is saying something, considering the state of disrepair of many of the former factories and commercial structures along Main Street. My walk through this area is a dispiriting one as I pass empty buildings and closed restaurants and reflect, with a heavy heart, on the contrast with what the area must have been like for most of the past two centuries.

The previous section of this entry with its description of the important role of the taverns in Spencer along the Upper Boston Post Road in the eighteenth century almost feels like fiction as I walk through the quiet center on a sunny day in August.⁴³ There is plenty of traffic along Main Street/Route 9 but few vehicles seem to stop in the center. The substantial, often elegant, but frequently under-utilized or empty buildings along the road indicate that Spencer Center was once a much more active place in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century. As I stand in front of Spencer Memorial Town Hall, built in 1926, I recall the words written about it in the Spencer Town Center National Register Historic District report (SPE.N): “built in the Colonial Revival style in 1926, [Town Hall] is the last institutional building to have been built in the district.”⁴⁴ It is astonishing to think that it has been one hundred years since a new institutional building was erected in Spencer Center, but the lack of development in the center of town is about more than just the decline of the economy of Spencer in the twentieth century; it is also about changes in lifestyle and in transportation during the last hundred years. Institutional, commercial, and residential buildings are spread all over Spencer today, as the automobile has become the principal means of transportation. The Fire Department, which was once housed in a building that still exists just behind Town Hall, is located one mile west of the center on West Main Street, as is the Police Department. David Prouty High School, once located a few yards up the hill from Town Hall, is now located one mile east of Town Hall, along Main Street, as discussed in the previous entry. The Post Office and the Richard Sugden Library are still located in the center of town, but there are few stores or restaurants nearby. A Walmart “Supercenter” opened recently across the border in Leicester, four miles east along the Upper Boston Post Road, which seems likely to hasten the demise of the few small businesses still trying to survive in Spencer Town Center.

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*Detail from Plate 17 of the* Atlas of Spencer Town Massachusetts, published in Boston in 1884 by George Walker & Co. The map shows the buildings along Main Street from the “Town House” at right to a little west of High Street at left. Notice the Massasoit Hotel in the center of the map and the numerous factories dedicated to the production of boots (in pink), including the largest company in town at the time, the “Isaac Prouty &Co. Boot Shop,” today the location of a shopping center.

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Although tavern-keeping was an important business, it was not the only business in the early history of Spencer Center. Some tavern keepers carried on other businesses simultaneously, as mentioned earlier. J.W. Temple, a town historian writing in the late 1880s, reports that: “tanning and currying [treating tanned leather] was an enterprise commenced in the early part of the present century and carried on by Ebenezer Mason. These works were located upon the site of the Heywood block.”⁴⁵ Mason utilized the stream which ran down from Moose Pond (now Lake Whittemore) and crossed the Upper Boston Post Road (now Main Street) near his property for his other business enterprise. The “Heywood block” can be seen on the map of Spencer Center from 1884 (above), shown as the property of “Mrs. M.L. Heywood,” on the south side of Main Street just opposite the house of “H. A. Grout.” The stream, now called Cider Mill Brook, runs through a culvert in the center of Spencer today, but reemerges south of Main Street near Elm Street. The stream can be seen on the 1898 map of Spencer Center below, running past the “J.E. Bacon & Co. Boot Manufacturers,” about which more shortly. The water power provided by the brooks and rivers of New England was the original engine which sparked a wave of manufacturing in nearly every town in Massachusetts by the early nineteenth century, including the town of Spencer. Today the Heywood block is occupied by a late nineteenth-century brick commercial building at 138 Main Street (SPE.253; c. 1885) which is currently used as a storage facility for the nearby Whitco Appliance Store, one of the few remaining retail businesses operating in the town center. A photograph in the Spencer Town Center Historic District Report (SPE.N, Photograph #9) taken by Nora Pat Small, a preservation consultant listed as an author of the report (along with Betsy Friedberg, preservation planner for the Massachusetts Historical Commission, and the members of the Spencer Historical Commission), shows the building as it looked in 1984, when it housed two retail businesses on the ground floor, Terry’s Card and Gift Shop, and a bicycle and moped repair shop. Half-open curtains and shades in the windows of the upper two floors indicate that these floors were also occupied at the time, perhaps with offices. Today there appear to be few signs of life in the upper stories, and a peek into the storefront windows reveals boxes of appliances piled on the darkened ground floor.

John Warner Barber, who traveled through each town in Massachusetts and published a “travel book” in 1839 entitled Historical Collections of Massachusetts, noted the early development of manufacturing in Worcester County: “Till within a few years almost all the people were farmers, and the great body still cultivate the soil. For the last few years many of the inhabitants have been employed in manufactures, especially in the southern part of the county. Water privileges abound in almost every town.”⁴⁶ As discussed in the previous entry, the principal commercial activity in the town of Spencer for many decades was the production of boots and shoes. Ebenezer Mason, like many farmers in New England in the winter, produced finished leather for the production of boots, an industry which started with small enterprises making boots by hand but which quickly escalated to mechanized production on an industrial scale. The production of boots was still a major industry in the early twentieth century, as Stephen Jenkins noted in his description of his visit in 1913: “Adjoining the Mason House in the valley below the town hall, the Post Road passes a large shoe shop, and we are reminded of the principal industry of this section, though woollen, cotton, and other leather goods are made here. Josiah Green was the pioneer maker of boots and shoes, which, as early as 1812, he used to peddle in Boston and the surrounding country; after the War of 1812, his business grew to large proportions.”⁴⁷ The “shoe shop” to which Jenkins referred, was the Isaac Prouty Boot & Shoe Company, whose large building complex can be seen on the 1884 map above and the 1898 map below.

Isaac Prouty (1798-1872) was orphaned at the age of twelve and began working in shoe and boot production at the age of thirteen.⁴⁸ After apprenticing for Josiah Green (discussed in the previous entry), Prouty moved to Paxton and then to Rutland making shoes for various companies, before returning to Spencer in 1820 to open his own business, north of the center, in Lower Wire Village. Prouty was very successful and moved operations to Spencer Center in 1854, at first in a new building near his recently purchased home near the Methodist Church (see the previous entry). Local historian Jeffrey Fiske states that, “Within ten years, this shop also proved to be too small, and a new building was constructed at what is now the entrance to the shopping center west of the Town Hall. This structure had five stories and was 42 x 104 feet. A steam engine with boilers was introduced for power and heat. In 1864 business was transferred to the new building.”⁴⁹ Prouty ran the business with his sons until both he and Lewis Prouty, one of his sons, died from pneumonia in 1872. Three of Isaac Prouty’s surviving sons took control of the business, which continued to grow as the company transitioned to making shoes as well as work boots. The map above from 1884 and the map from 1898 below show the continued expansion of buildings on the Prouty factory lot, which was originally the Mason property. As discussed above, the Mason House (the small yellow building on the 1884 and 1898 maps near Main Street) managed to survive amid the factory buildings until 1938, when it was torn down.

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*Detail from Plate 23 of the 1898* Atlas of Worcester County, published by L.J. Richards, showing the center of Spencer. The major change from the 1884 map is the addition of the “Sugden Block” and the “Richard Sugden Library” on the former Grout family property.

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Barber noted with admirable precision in his description of the town of Spencer that, in 1837, “there were 52,091 pairs of boots and 2,940 pairs of shoes manufactured; value, $106,496; males employed, 162; females, 28.”⁵⁰ By 1850 all manufacturing in the town of Spencer amounted to $340,000 in revenue, according to James Draper, and the six largest companies, principally boot makers including the company operated by Isaac Prouty, all had revenue between $20,000 and $40,000.⁵¹ In 1860, Isaac Prouty operated the largest company by revenue, taking in $150,000.⁵² By the 1880s the Isaac Prouty Boot & Shoe Company employed fifteen hundred workers and revenue amounted to two million dollars.⁵³ J.W. Temple, the town historian who lived in the house on the site of the Livermore Tavern, was also involved in the shoe and boot production business, and provided the following information in his 1889 survey of the town: “There are, then, eight boot and shoe manufacturing establishments in the town at the present time. The value of leather goods in 1885 was $2,617,736 and the total value of all goods made in the town in 1885 was $3,627,427.” In other words, 72% of total value was in leather goods, which basically meant shoes. Isaac Prouty Boot & Shoe Company, with a revenue of nearly two million dollars, was not only the dominant shoe manufacturing company in Spencer, it was by far the largest generator of revenue in the town in the 1880s.

A series of strikes, followed by the financial crisis in 1893, caused the company to file for bankruptcy in 1894, after which it was reorganized. The strikes and the financial turmoil of the era resulted in the consolidation of many of the factories operating in Spencer and the company founded by Isaac Prouty was temporarily the main beneficiary of this new dynamic. According to the Historic District Report, “By 1900, sales totaled nearly $3 million, and employment was over 1,400. The major firm remained that of Isaac Prouty & Company, which also operated its own tannery.”⁵⁴ In 1909, the company stopped making boots and switched to producing only shoes. Despite a brief revival making shoes for the government during wartime from 1917, the company never recovered its former vitality, slowly declined and, “with the coming of the depression, Isaac Prouty & Company quietly went out of business. No date can be established for when production finally came to a halt. When it did stop, however, it was probably thought by many to be only a temporary closing. In a 1932 report on business conditions, the company is not even mentioned.”⁵⁵ The buildings were taken over by other companies and shoes continued to be produced into the 1960s, but the last of the shoe companies operating at the old Prouty factory buildings moved out in 1962, and the production of shoes ceased at the Isaac Prouty Company buildings, which were razed in 1963 and 1964.

In 1965 the lot was sold and developed as Spencer Shopper’s Village. This is the bland shopping center located behind the milestone reading 59 Mile from Boston, which was described in the Spencer Town Center Historic District Report (SPE.N) as one of “the two major intrusions” in the Historic District, the other being “a group of small modern stores at the southwest corner of Main and Maple where the old Union Block used to stand.”⁵⁶ Since these words were written in the mid-1980s there has been a third “major intrusion” in the Historic District, the CVS pharmacy building on the block between Pleasant Street and High Street, to which I shall be returning at the end of this entry. As for the second “major intrusion,” it has metastasized: the ugly modern commercial building at 162 Main Street, at the southwest corner of Main and Maple Streets, has been joined by an even uglier commercial building next door at 158 Main Street, fronted by a large parking lot, a development which replaced the Greek-Revival-style building from 1840 (SPE.246, demolished after 1984) that stood in that location when the report was produced in the mid-1980s.

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Selling Spencer.

*Bacon, Kent, and Company Boot Factory (1875), 136 Main Street, Spencer.*

The report for the Spencer Town Center Historic District notes that “most of the commercial and industrial structures [in the historic district] are concentrated west of Maple Street…commercial buildings are concentrated between the Town Hall and Elm Street, where the land gradually levels out as one proceeds west.”⁵⁷ The relatively level terrain in the center of town, along with the presence of Cider Mill Brook, whose water was used to power machinery in the earliest factories, explains the concentration of factories in the center of town seen on the nineteenth-century maps. Located on the next lot west of the site used by Mason for his leather-processing business is “one of the best preserved factory buildings in town.”⁵⁸ The Bacon, Kent & Company Boot Factory (SPE.254; 1875; 136 Main Street, see photo at left) was originally built as the Bush and Grout factory (an earlier Bush & Grout building can be seen at the location on the 1870 map above), but it appears on the 1884 map above as “Bacon Kent & Co. Boot Shop” and on the 1898 map below as “J.E. Bacon & Co. Boot Manufacturers.” Boot production ended sometime around 1909, although various manufacturing enterprises continued in parts of the building for decades afterwards. A commercial addition was added to the front of the building at street level, and this was occupied for decades, first by a pharmacy and a clothing store, then by an A&P Grocery store for fifteen years (1947-1962) and, later still, by a furniture store.⁵⁹ More recently it apparently housed a medical practice; on my most recent walk along the road through the area (August 2026) a sign on the front of the forlorn building still advertised the offices of three medical doctors, but a quick search on the internet indicates that the first doctor on the sign died in 2021, the second now practices in Worcester, and the third has a practice in New Britain, Connecticut. The door is firmly locked and the building, centrally located at the intersection of Main Street and Pleasant Street, is in obvious need of maintenance. According to Jeffrey Fiske, writing in 1990, the building, like many other historic buildings in Spencer discussed in these entries, was owned at that time by William Ekleberry (1935-1996), the operator of the Spencer Country Inn. The sad state of the Bacon & Kent Boot Factory is not unlike that of the Bank Block and of Denny Hall (discussed in the previous entry), both also owned at some point by the Ekleberry family and both underutilized buildings that appear to be in need of significant repair. Whoever the current owner is of these important and iconic buildings along the Upper Boston Post Road in Spencer, they deserve more attention than they are currently receiving and all of them appear to be in some danger of following the same path to oblivion as the Union Block, the Prouty Factory buildings, and so many other buildings, not only in Spencer but along the entire route of the Upper Boston Post Road.

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*Marsh Block (SPE.247; 1865) at 252-254 Main Street, Spencer. The oldest “commercial” property in Spencer Center.*

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Spencer Town Center was not only a manufacturing hub in the nineteenth century, it was also a thriving commercial district. According to the Spencer Town Center Historic District Report (SPE.N), “The oldest commercial building in the district is probably the Marsh Block at the southeast corner of Main and Mechanic Streets.”⁶⁰ This must refer to buildings specifically constructed as commercial structures because, as I discussed earlier, the home of Jeremiah Grout, diagonally across the road at 125 Main Street, which likely dates to 1834, is currently occupied by a beauty salon, and a few other buildings currently occupied by businesses along the road likely were built as residences before the Civil War, while the Marsh Block (shown on the 1870, the 1884, and the 1898 map as the “Marsh” property located on the southeast corner of Main and Mechanic Streets) was built around 1865. Whether it is technically the oldest commercial building or not, the Marsh Block (SPE.247; 1865; 252-254 Main Street) is a large, prominent, appealing building, with a “rambling frame structure and its barn [which] retain their mid-nineteenth century character,” painted yellow with green trim on the storefronts. The building appears to have been renovated in the recent past and has storefronts along both Main Street and Mechanic Street, most of which seem to be occupied, an uncommon occurrence in the buildings in Spencer Town Center.

This building at 150 Main Street (SPE.248) in Spencer dates to c. 1840. The first floor houses a lovely flower and gift shop called Appleblossoms, which would not be out of place in Boston. The area around Mechanic Street is the liveliest section of downtown Spencer, with a number of small businesses filling the smaller commercial buildings.

The next few buildings west along the south side of Main Street make up the most lively block in the Town Center Historic District, with a series of eclectic smaller commercial buildings dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and housing a florist and gift shop, a hair salon, a burger bar, and the aforementioned Whitco appliance store. A number of other interesting commercial buildings remain along Main Street, but most have no tenants and some have been marred, as the historic report describes it, by the “unsympathetic application of new sidings,” a phrase I have quoted before in these entries and one which I will almost certainly quote again as I describe my walk west along the Upper Boston Post Road.

The most notable commercial building in Spencer Town Center is the impressive Sugden Block (SPE.222; 117 Main Street; 1890, National Register, see photo earlier in this entry), a red-brick Richardsonian-Revival Style building. The building was one of two buildings on adjacent lots donated to the town by Richard Sugden (1815-1895), a wealthy owner of a wire mill in what became known as Upper Wire Village.⁶¹ The second building was built at the same time directly behind the commercial building fronting Main Street. At a town meeting “on April 2, 1888 the town received the gift of a high school from David Prouty, a public park from Luther Hill, and the much-needed library from wıre manufacturer Richard Sugden. Sugden offered a building, free of encumbrances to the town, but two conditions had to be met. First, the building could not cost more than twenty-five thousand dollars; and second, the reading room must be open to the public on Sundays.”⁶²

Both buildings were erected on the corner lot referred to as “Grout’s Corner” in older histories of the town as it was long-occupied by the Grout family. Older maps of the area show numerous buildings on the large lot at the corner of Main and Pleasant Street owned by the Grout family, including a store on the corner, visible on the 1857, 1870, and 1884 maps above. Sugden purchased the lot in 1888, knocked down all but the house that remains at 125 Main Street, and construction on the library and the Sugden Block began shortly thereafter. The handsome Richardsonian-Romanesque Richard Sugden Library (SPE.103; 1889; 8 Pleasant Street, see photo above) was the first building completed and opened August 15, 1889. The library is described in the historic district report (SPE.N) as “built of brick, with sandstone trim, the building displays many of the typical elements of the style, including low, arched entry porch, massive square tower with colonnaded windows, bell roof, and enormous acorn finials, a quarter-round stair tower, and roof trimmed with decorative flashing. The building rests on a foundation of cut granite. It has sustained little alteration on either exterior or interior.”⁶³ Although the library is not directly on the Upper Boston Post Road, it is clearly visible from Main Street as it is only one building north of the intersection of Main Street and Pleasant Street. It is also of architectural interest and is intimately connected to the Sugden Block next door, which was built at the same time and was part of the same gift of Richard Sugden to the town. In fact, Sugden “directed that the library trustees be in charge of the property and that income from the buildings be used at the discretion of the trustees for maintenance of the library and the purchase of books, periodicals, and other materials.”⁶⁴

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*Richard Sugden Public Library (1889), Spencer, Massachusetts.*

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The elegant three-story brick Sugden building, with commercial space on the ground floor and offices on the upper floors, was completely occupied upon its completion in 1890 and for decades was a thriving building with stores and the offices of newspapers, lawyers, and other businesses. As recently as 1982 the building even hosted a pub named for General Knox in the ground floor space recently occupied by the Mexicali Cantina Grill, adjacent to the Knox Trail Memorial Marker. Sadly, the building was largely unoccupied in recent years and, instead of generating revenue for the library, became a costly burden to the library and to the town. Newspaper articles from 2017 through 2019 first discussed the potential demolition of the building and then lauded the purchase of the building (for the absurdly low price of $50,000) by the owners of the Mexicali Grill, who planned to expand the restaurant and to convert the upper floors to apartments. The development plans were praised by Selectman Gary Woodbury at the time they were announced: “Instead of having a slowly deteriorating building maintained at the public’s expense, this developer will fully renovate the Sugden Block and bring back vitality to a key part of downtown. This is a big win for us.” On my first walk through Spencer in August 2024, the ground floor was still occupied by the aforementioned restaurant but it has since closed, and brown paper covered many of the windows at ground level when I passed on subsequent walks. At the time of my most recent walk, in August 2026, the brown paper on some of the ground floor windows had recently been removed and a sign had appeared on a window indicating that a new tenant (another Mexican restaurant called Tijuana Bar & Grill according to the sign) is preparing to occupy some of the ground floor space. Large green banners flying from the building advertise “Sugden Block Apartments,” and there are shades and curtains on the windows in the upper two floors which indicate that the apartments have been completed and that some are occupied. The redevelopment of the Sugden Block appears to be at least a partial success; the restaurant may have failed and there may not be any active tenants currently on the ground floor, but there are at least some occupied apartments in the converted building and, most importantly for the integrity of the Spencer Town Center Historic District, the building has not been demolished, which had been its likely fate otherwise.

One more block of commercial buildings line the south side of Main Street west from Wall Street (opposite Pleasant Street) to Elm Street (opposite High Street). Unfortunately, most of these buildings are also under-occupied. The most interesting building from an aesthetic perspective is probably the Ames Block (SPE.257; 124 Main Street; 1876), about which the historic district report notes, “the storefront of the two-story brick structure has been altered, but it has retained its commercial Romanesque appearance on the second floor, with its corbelled cornice and stone sill and belt-courses. James H. Ames remained in the dry goods business until the early part of this century.”⁶⁵ Various stores operated in the building and, “from the late 1940’s through the mid-1960’s, the store served as a soda shop. During this time, especially during the fifties, it was a popular gathering place for teenagers.”⁶⁶ Sadly, it too appears to be unoccupied at present.

The Spencer Town Center Historic District ends a few buildings west, with the western boundary located just beyond the building on the southwest corner of Main Street and Elm Street. The Kingsley Block (SPE.260; 102-108 Main Street; 1898) was one of the last large commercial buildings to be built in Spencer Town Center, during a period of rapid growth in the post-Civil War era: “By the close of the 19th century Spencer had become a regionally significant commercial center (supporting more than ninety retail establishments in 1905). From 1891 to 1925, an electric trolley system ran sporadically down Main Street, uniting Worcester, Leicester, and Spencer. No remnants of this system are today in place.”⁶⁷ The Kingsley Block at least has some tenants, including a barber shop and even some occupied apartments in the upper floors but, like other buildings along Main Street, appears to be underutilized. With the exception of the vibrant one hundred-yard stretch west from the Marsh Block, many of the businesses in the downtown area seem to have gone the way of the trolley, and some of the buildings seem destined to follow. I was informed by one local business owner that the Bacon & Kent building at 136 Main Street may soon go the way of the Isaac Prouty buildings.

*Richard Sugden House (1875), 7 High Street, Spencer.*

At least the buildings described above in the walk through Spencer Town Center have survived despite their precarious status, the rumors about their future, and the continued lack of what Selectman Woodbury referred to as “vitality” in the downtown area. The block along the north side of Main Street from Pleasant Street to High Street has suffered a far worse fate. The entire block today is occupied by a CVS pharmacy surrounded by a large parking lot, which spoils the view east from the sidewalk in front of the impressive house overlooking Spencer Town Center that Richard Sugden moved into in 1875 (SPE.R; 7 High Street; 1875). For more than a century after Sugden moved into his new house the block between his house and the buildings he eventually donated to the town was occupied by some of the most prominent architectural and historically significant buildings in Spencer. Directly across the street from his house, facing Main Street, was a Second Empire house (c. 1870) shown on maps above from 1870, 1884, and 1898 owned first by William Watson (1815-1896), a later owner of the neighboring Jenks Tavern, and his family. This house survived at least into the 1980s and can be seen in photographs in the Spencer Town Center Historic District Report (see photo below).

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This photograph, taken by Nora Pat Small in 1984 and included in the Spencer Town Center Historic District Report (SPE.N Photo #11, page 18), shows the view *east from the corner of Elm Street* of the block on the north side of Main Street between High Street and Pleasant Street. At left is the former Watson House (c. 1870). The Kenwood Diner, later moved to the grounds of the Spencer Country Inn, is at the center of the photograph, while the site of the Massasoit Hotel is behind the “Moxie” sign. Today a CVS pharmacy occupies the block (see photo below). *In the background is the Sugden Block.*

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Holding on to the Center.

When the Jenks tavern burned down in 1870, the property was purchased by Richard Sugden and other investors who opened a large new hotel on the lot, the Massasoit Hotel.⁶⁸ This hotel led a precarious existence for much of its history, suffering from fires, vandalism (strike-breakers were reputed to be housed there in the 1890s and the building was damaged by angry factory workers throwing stones), high operating costs (it was expensive to heat), and lack of business (principally because Spencer became a dry town in 1900, much to the chagrin of the operators and patrons of the bar at the hotel), until it finally succumbed to a large fire in 1982, which completely destroyed the building. The bar had apparently reopened when Stewart Holbrook visited Spencer during his “research” for his book The Old Post Road (1962), in which he noted that, “on the site of the most famous of the taverns [Jenks] is the ‘new or 1912’ [sic] Massasoit House, which today advertises a cocktail lounge but has no place to eat.”⁶⁹ Perhaps he had a cocktail or two at the lounge, which might have contributed to his inability to find the milestone prominently located on the sidewalk only a few yards away from the old hotel entrance.

The site of the Jenks Tavern and the Hotel Massasoit is today commemorated by markers along Main Street (see photos above and below). For many decades the Kenwood Diner also once stood just west of the markers along Main Street (see photo above), but it was later moved to the parking lot of the Spencer Country Inn to make way for the CVS, as I discussed in the first entry describing my walk through the town of Spencer along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road. The demolition of two houses and the complete restructuring of one of the most historic blocks in Spencer located at the heart of the Spencer Town Center Historic District was controversial, but approval was granted nonetheless, and the new building opened in 2023. Not only does the CVS feel completely out of place in this historic location, the entire enterprise appears to this traveler passing through the otherwise architecturally interesting Spencer Town Center as a colossal failure of imagination, it smells of desperation, and it perhaps reeks of something far worse.

One of the more surreal statements at the ribbon-cutting ceremony was made by Selectman Anthony Pepe, as paraphrased by the Spencer Journal: “Pepe said the goal was for the new building, which stands at the site of the Massasoit Hotel that burned in 1982, to blend in downtown.” If I were to say one single thing about the CVS in downtown Spencer it would be that it does NOT blend in downtown. My principal criticism of the project is that the building is completely surrounded by a parking lot. Had the designers truly intended the building to “blend in downtown” they should have designed the building to be at street level with a direct entrance from the sidewalk and parking located behind the building. Instead, the CVS looks like a giant battleship on a sea of asphalt incongruously looming over the road, elevated a few feet above and away from the sidewalk. It does not “blend in downtown” at all as it is particularly uninviting to pedestrians, who are forced to cross the parking lot in order to enter the building. From the closest point on Main Street a walk of 233 feet is required just to reach the entrance of the store, a distance that is eight feet longer than the length of the block along Main Street on which the building is located. I witnessed one or two enterprising pedestrians squeeze through the gap in the fence on the corner of Main and Pleasant and scramble up the slope to gain quicker access to the store, but that just proves my point that the building is not pedestrian-friendly.

Town Administrator Jeffrey Bridges added “This is one of the first steps to revitalize this area,” and continued to wax lyrical, as reported in the article, about the new CVS being “part of the walkable community. Within a few blocks, pedestrians can get groceries, dine at restaurants, buy gifts including flowers and jewelry and pick up prescriptions. With senior housing at both Howe Village and Senior Living at Prouty a short distance away, a larger CVS with more offerings is a welcome addition and can help boost the local economy.” The addition of a “larger CVS” somehow makes the area more walkable, despite the fact that the CVS moved a distance of 800 feet west of its former location in Spencer Shopper’s Village, a four minute walk away, where it was located next door to the grocery store, and directly across the street from the florist and the jeweler. Also unstated is the fact that both Howe Village and Senior Living at Prouty are located east of Shopper’s Village and are thus further away from the CVS than they used to be. Perhaps what making the downtown area “more walkable” actually meant was that you would be able to walk more because the distances were greater between stores. I won’t even begin to address the absurd notion that the only way that a larger CVS could be built was to demolish a large chunk of Spencer’s historical fabric instead of rebuilding the hideous structure that the pharmacy already occupied in Shopper’s Village. Finally, an article in the Worcester Business Journal in 2024 reported that the property was sold to a company which owns multiple McDonald’s franchises; that statement alone immediately sets the “spider-sense” tingling. This entire enterprise is obscene on so many levels that I need to stop thinking about it before I weary of walking the road further.

*“Oh, yeah, you blend!” CVS Pharmacy in the block formerly occupied by the Hotel Massasoit and, before that, the Jenks Tavern.*

Look, I get it. The town wants to bring “vitality” back to the downtown area and so approves projects like the CVS Pharmacy development hoping that people will stop in for their prescription and then have a cup of coffee or buy an appliance. The problem is that a large corporation like CVS has zero interest in the town of Spencer or in the preservation of what makes Spencer special. If business could be improved by 5% by moving to another spot in town or even out of town entirely and the company could achieve that goal without incurring too many costs (or, better still, get the taxpayers to foot the bill), the pharmacy would shutter immediately, leaving an empty lot taking up one of the most historic locations and the most central block in the town of Spencer. I think this is exactly the wrong type of development for a block of such historic importance. Perhaps the Sugden Block development will also come to nothing and the building will be demolished as was planned ten years ago, but at least the goal in that case is to revitalize a historic building and to bring people to live in the center of town, which is a much more promising way to restore the much sought after “vitality” that the Spencer Town Center so obviously lacks.

The Upper Boston Post Road ceased to be the “main” road as early as 1810, with the opening of the Stafford Turnpike. However, the burgeoning manufacturing sector gave the town center a new purpose, and the town grew steadily in the nineteenth century. The decline of manufacturing and the advent of the automobile decimated the town center, and, despite some efforts on the part of town officials and local businessmen, downtown Spencer has not recovered. I don’t claim to be able to offer a simple solution to a complicated problem, but it seems clear to me that the willful destruction of the historical fabric of the town in pursuit of a potential downtown renaissance seems like the worst possible choice. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is coming into Spencer because there is a new and bigger CVS. A McDonald’s won’t help either. An additional consideration in the revitalization of Spencer Town Center is that it will never work if it is not initiated organically; that is, by small businesses rather than by large corporations. In my opinion, encouraging many diverse small businesses to open in the smaller and mostly under-occupied spaces in the collection of historic buildings that already exist in Spencer Center is a much better strategy, in spite of the risk that some will inevitably fail, than putting all your eggs in one large corporate basket and the inevitable demands for zoning changes to accommodate the perceived needs required to maximize profits regardless of the irreversible and the frequently damaging consequences of those changes. How the destruction of the architectural fabric of downtown Spencer, the very thing that makes Spencer Town Center interesting and worth revitalizing, came to be seen as the solution to the lack of vitality in Spencer Town Center is a mystery.

The town instead should lean into its elegant historical backdrop and use it to attract sympathetic developers who might be able to keep the essential structure of the buildings intact while repurposing the older structures for contemporary use. Perhaps the cost of living crisis in eastern Massachusetts will push people to look for slightly more affordable towns further west like Spencer, where new apartment buildings in renovated old buildings at slightly lower prices might compensate for a slightly longer commute. Notwithstanding the noxious intrusion of the CVS Pharmacy, the architecture of Spencer and the streetscape is quite charming as the photograph at the beginning of this entry illustrates. The presence of so many historic buildings in a variety of interesting architectural styles would be the selling point for me if I were charged with revitalizing Spencer Town Center. The collection of historical architecture in Spencer Town Center is a unique asset which needs to be maintained not a burden to be discarded.

However, I am a stranger merely passing through town, and my time in Spencer Town Center is nearly at an end. It is not up to me to decide the future of Spencer nor do I want the job. I merely offer my observations as somebody who is interested in the Upper Boston Post Road and the towns, the buildings, the sites, and the people that I encounter as I walk along the road. If the Jenks Tavern still existed I would be drinking a beer right about now and thinking about the walk ahead. I would even deign to order a cocktail if the lounge in the Massasoit Hotel still existed. I would never set foot in a McDonald’s were it to appear in the spot where the Jenks Tavern once stood. It appears my choice is limited to Savage Smash Burgers & Brews in the lovely Italianate building at 148 Main Street (SPE.249; 148 Main Street; 1870). At least I have a choice and it turns out to be a decent one! Once inside, I offer a toast to the original taverns that first brought attention to the town of Spencer, as well as to the small businesses trying to hold on in the Center/ “centre” in these parlous times.

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*Offering a toast on a visit to Savage Smash Burgers, the only restaurant currently operating along Main Street in Spencer Center: To the Center holding!*

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I would like to acknowledge Nora Pat Small, one of the authors (and the principal photographer) of the Spencer Town Center Historic District Report (SPE.N in the MACRIS catalog). The report, with its detailed research and excellent photographs showing the buildings and the area as it looked in the 1980s, has been invaluable to me as I visit the area forty years later and compare the current state of the area with its historical antecedents.

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Distance traveled in this entry along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road: 0.2 miles.

Total Distance traveled thus far along the route of the Upper Boston Post Road from Worcester Courthouse to Springfield “Meeting House” (ten entries): 12.0 miles.

Total Distance traveled along the original route of the road from the Old State House in Boston for this project: 58.8 miles.

Total Distance covered for all the walks described in Boston Rambles: 120.3 miles.

Posted in History, Milestones, Roads, Upper Boston Post Road on 28 August 2026 and tagged Milestones, Old Roads, PostRoad, Worcester County
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Boston Rambles

A Rambler Walks and Talks About the Hub of the Universe

Spencer, Massachusetts, #3.

A Faithful Walk through the Interior

Part Three– The Center Cannot Hold

Upper Boston Post Road #25 (UBPR #25)

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Spencer, Massachusetts, #3.

A Faithful Walk through the Interior

Part Three– The Center Cannot Hold

Upper Boston Post Road #25 (UBPR #25)

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