Lyman School for Boys

Powder Hill in Westborough holds the former Lyman School for Boys, a state reform school campus first developed in 1886. Spread across roughly 200 acres of hilltop, slopes, fields and woodland, it was the first campus in the Massachusetts system laid out on the cottage plan. Small brick dormitories, staff housing, a hospital, a school and farm buildings replaced the idea of one large central structure, with the aim of giving the boys a more homelike setting. Surviving buildings include Queen Anne cottages from 1886 to 1903, a 1909 Arts and Crafts dormitory, Colonial Revival dormitories of the early 1930s, and several older farmhouses adapted for school use, two of them individually listed in 1980. Since the school closed in the early 1970s, demolition, neglect and new construction have reduced the campus, and the original Theodore Lyman Hall is gone. The district is listed because it still conveys the form and character of the school as it developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.