Princeton Center Historic District

Princeton's town center is organized around a grassy, tree-lined common set on a rising, rocky knoll. At its northern end, two masonry buildings by architect Stephen C. Earle look down over the green. Goodnow Memorial Building, completed in 1883, is a Richardsonian Romanesque structure of Milford granite with brownstone trim and a seventy-foot clock tower. It was built to house both a library and a school. Bagg Hall, the town hall, followed in 1885 in pressed red brick with brownstone trim and a four-story conical-roofed turret. Its upper floor holds a meeting hall with a stage. Both buildings keep much of their original interior woodwork, stairs and stained glass. The district also includes the common itself, a c. 1950 granite War Memorial Bench and a 1992 bandstand that does not contribute to the historic character. Historic houses, a store and a church ring the common outside the boundary, reinforcing the strongly nineteenth-century character of the center.