High Street Historic District

High Street in Wilmington, Massachusetts, is lined with single-family houses that record the town's shift from farmland to suburb. The district covers about sixteen and a half acres and includes seventeen principal houses, three carriage barns and three garages. Six surviving houses were built between about 1851 and 1856, when members of old local families, including the Blanchards, Carters and Harndens, began selling acre lots; the area became known as "New City." These early houses blend Greek Revival, Italianate and Gothic-flavored details, and two were built by housewrights Sylvester Woodward and George Fall. Later houses, dating from about 1880 to the 1950s, add Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, Craftsman bungalow, Neo-Federal and Cape Cod designs. Three houses were moved, two of them to make way for Interstate 93 in the 1950s. The district was recognized for its role in community development and for its architecture, and it may also hold archaeological evidence of a 1665 homestead and of nineteenth-century shoemaking.