Bolton Center Historic District

Bolton Center is the 73-acre historic core of Bolton, Massachusetts, laid out along Main Street (Route 117), formerly the Lancaster Road, a major colonial and early nineteenth-century route. Buildings line the winding road against wooded hills to the north and low wetlands to the south. The district holds about 90 contributing resources, including a brick town house of 1853, a fieldstone and tile Tudor Revival library of 1903, the 1923 Emerson School, and a Colonial Revival church of 1928. Most houses date from the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, giving the center a largely Federal and Greek Revival character, with scattered Italianate, Queen Anne and Craftsman houses. Remnants of a stagecoach-era inn, two early commercial buildings, working farmsteads, barns, stone walls, a mill site and a stagecoach mileage marker recall the town's farming and transportation past. Few intrusions disturb the village, which has served as the town center since Bolton's incorporation in 1738.