North Main Avenue Historic District

Northwest of Newton's commercial center, this roughly T-shaped neighborhood of about sixty-five acres contains 105 primary buildings arranged along north-south avenues and east-west streets. North Main Avenue, the earliest settled road and the spine of the district, holds the largest group of buildings. The oldest house, the Pope-Rudisill-Gordon House, may date to the late 1840s and shows transitional Federal-Greek Revival features. Later houses include Italianate and Queen Anne examples such as the 1908 Walter C. Feimster House, along with Colonial Revival homes, bungalows and several churches and schools. Newton's first graded school, a brick Romanesque Revival building, opened here in 1906 and helped make the area the town's most desirable neighborhood. Larger, more ornate houses, fairly uniform setbacks and mature landscaping set the district apart from the more modest and altered housing, mills and modern buildings around it. It preserves most of Newton's intact historic domestic architecture.