Junction Shop and Herman Street District (Additional Documentation)

Brick factories crowd three blocks along Hermon, Beacon and Jackson Streets in Worcester, next to the junction of two railroads. The district began in 1851 with the Junction Shop, a three-storey stucco-covered stone-chip building 450 feet long and 50 feet wide, built for Colonel James Estabrook and Charles Wood. It was the first and largest of a series of rental factories the Estabrook family built here through the 1920s. Tenants made a wide range of goods, including looms, organs, water meters, machine screws, thread, corsets and machine tools. The Knowles Loom Works used the Junction Shop from 1879, and the Cereal Machine Company, which produced the first shredded wheat biscuit, occupied much of it in the 1890s. Later buildings include the Union Water Meter Company factory of 1872 and the Taylor & Farley organ factory of 1865. The district was drawn to include the area's nineteenth-century factories and their architecturally important facades, and it contains one of Worcester's densest groupings of such buildings, most of them unaltered.