Upper Chapin Street Historic District

Upper Chapin Street is a compact neighborhood of fourteen gable-front, side-hall cottages, one-and-a-half or two stories high, facing each other along Chapin Street south of Dresser Street in Southbridge. Built between 1870 and 1898, they express the Italianate, Gothic, Stick and Queen Anne styles in a vernacular way. Brackets, bargeboards and cross bracing survive on most houses, although old photographs show that some once had more elaborate jigsaw-cut gables. The street was laid out in the 1870s, and seven houses stood by 1878. It formed part of a wider pattern of middle-class development around Elm Street that began about 1870, soon after the railroad arrived and as local industry grew. By 1898 nearly the whole street was built up. The district is valued as the best-preserved late-19th-century residential neighborhood in town, with houses intact on both sides of the street and a consistent period character.