Conway Center Historic District

Conway Center is the compact village core of Conway, Massachusetts, set on a narrow floodplain where South River meets Pumpkin Hollow Brook and crowded by steep wooded hills. The twenty-four acre district runs along Main Street, Elm Street and Academy Hill Road and holds houses, a hotel, shops, a bank, a town hall, a library and many barns and sheds. Buildings date from about 1830 to the mid-twentieth century, and most are modest wood-frame structures with Greek Revival and Gothic Revival details from the 1840s and 50s, when the village grew fastest. Civic activity moved here from Pumpkin Hollow in the 1840s. The brick Federal Morse-Tucker house is the only brick house, and the neoclassical Field Memorial Library of 1901, with its copper dome, anchors the east end of Main Street. Barns recall the importance of farming and horse transport. Small monuments, a 1905 drinking fountain and two historic bridges add to the setting, which has little modern intrusion.