East Main-Cherry Street Historic District (Boundary Increase)

Luther Hill Park is a fourteen-acre public park on the shore of Lake Whittemore in Spencer, Massachusetts. Laid out in 1888 on part of the Bemis farm, it was bought for the town through the efforts of Luther Hill, a local leader who also helped bring the railroad and utilities to Spencer. A curving drive loops around a rocky, pine-covered center, with a fieldstone embankment fitted with iron rings for tethering horses and fieldstone boundary walls. Henry R. Green carried out the layout. The park reflects the City Beautiful Movement and picturesque landscape ideas, offering a natural retreat for a growing factory town. Dance pavilions, boathouses, steamboats and a café added in the 1880s and 1890s drew crowds of thousands, though those structures are gone. Later changes include a bathhouse, tennis courts and a playground. Today the park is used for swimming, picnics and walking. Its landforms and vegetation remain its most notable historic features.