Hamilton Historic District

Along three-quarters of a mile of Bay Road in Hamilton, Massachusetts, a 62-acre district preserves the old village center once called The Hamlet, the Third Parish of Ipswich. Twenty houses from the early eighteenth through the nineteenth century sit beside a Greek Revival meeting house, a Colonial Revival Town Hall of 1898, a c. 1840 village store, a small green and a cemetery dating from 1706. Trees, stone walls and fences line the road, and no cross roads interrupt it. The area matters as the core from which the town grew after it separated from Ipswich in 1793. It was home to town leaders and to Rev. Manasseh Cutler, who lived at 624 Bay Road and worked for the Ohio Company of Associates on the purchase of Northwest Territory land and on the Ordinance of 1787. A company of local men left from his house in December 1787 to found Marietta, Ohio. The center still resembles its appearance on maps of 1856 to 1884.