Church Street Historic District

Church Street in Wilmington, Massachusetts, is lined with a group of about 40 buildings, mostly houses, built between roughly 1850 and 1924. The street was laid out between 1850 and 1856 to connect the town center with the Boston & Lowell rail depot, and it became a favored address for the town's growing non-farming middle class and several prominent citizens. Queen Anne houses dominate, ranging from simple front-gable types to large, exuberant designs with a tower, jerkin-head roof and Gothic-arched gables. Five houses were built on speculation by builders Howard M. Horton and Charles I. Freeman, and they read more like a middle-class development than workers' housing. Italianate, Colonial Revival, Craftsman and Dutch Colonial examples add variety. Houses sit well back on open lots with large street trees. The district is regarded as the finest collection of late 19th and early 20th century architecture in Wilmington, and it also has archaeological potential.