Granville Village Historic District

Granville Village, also called East Granville or Jockey Corners, is a half-mile stretch of Massachusetts Route 57 lined with old maple trees. It is mostly residential, with 19th-century clapboard houses of modest ornament, along with a library, a Grange hall, a parsonage and a drum factory. The district includes a triangular common at the meeting of Granby Road and Maple Street. Its growth followed the drum trade. Noble and Cooley began making drums in 1854, and the company later moved to Water Street beside Dickinson Brook. Its surviving buildings have been used continuously. Workers lived in small Greek Revival houses along Main Road, and the Civil War boom brought merchants who built Italianate, Queen Anne and Colonial Revival homes on Maple Street. Other landmarks include the 1850 academy building, later a Baptist parsonage, the 1890 Grange and the 1901 Romanesque Revival public library. A few early houses, dating from 1804 to about 1820, record the village's beginnings as a small crossroads.