Natick Center Historic District

Natick Center is the commercial and civic heart of the town, a compact group of fifteen buildings along Main Street near its crossing with Central Street. A fire on January 13, 1874 leveled nearly all of the principal downtown buildings, and twelve structures in the district were rebuilt between 1874 and 1888. The result is a continuous wall of 19th-century storefronts with a consistent scale, color and texture. High Victorian Gothic dominates, seen in the First Congregational Church, the Morse Institute library and the Masonic Block. Clark's Block is Italianate, and the Walcott Building shows Richardsonian Romanesque influence. The district also holds the Harwood Baseball Shop, built in 1858 and reported to be the oldest factory of its kind in the country, a 1875 central fire station, and a turn-of-the-century diner. The area was important to Natick's shoemaking-era prosperity and municipal life, and it survived largely intact because little later growth replaced it.