Blackstone Manufacturing Company Historic District

Blackstone Village, in the southern part of the town of Blackstone, Massachusetts, grew around a textile company founded on the Blackstone River. This district covers the company's nineteenth-century holdings: tenement blocks, single-family houses, a church, a store with a meeting hall, and the open site of its mills. Buildings date from 1809, and most were finished by 1866. The company built at least forty of them, with much of the work from the 1840s to the 1860s done by local craftsmen Charles Aldrich and Allen Chase. Greek Revival is the predominant style, with modest detail such as boxed cornices and corner posts. Tenements were divided horizontally and vertically among many families. The 1861 brick Overseers Block and the 1866 brick blocks on Butler Street show later company housing. Remnants of headraces and tailraces and a stone mill building from 1844 mark the mill site, whose buildings were demolished in 1904. The district records how one company shaped a whole village.