Photographs from the nomination case file, National Park Service records.
Old Stone Church
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in
1973. A historic map-sheet match is not published yet. The record needs a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary.
From the record
one of 500 National Register listings in Worcester County · listed in 1973 · category: Building · one of 1 National Historic Landmarks in Worcester County.
National Register reference number.73000329- the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.
Fires near this property
55 since 2015
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The
federal wildfire occurrence database
lists 55 fires within 5 miles of Old Stone Church between
2015 and 2020, burning about 34 acres in total. None started naturally. 4 were recorded as arson.
Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted
here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.
Reported cause
Fires
Debris and open burning
30
Missing data/not specified/undetermined
12
Recreation and ceremony
6
Arson/incendiarism
4
Smoking
2
Equipment and vehicle use
1
The most recent of
them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service
that recorded it.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. Museums hold 1,907 specimens
collected within 10 miles of Old Stone Church between 1839 and
1974: 1,099 Plantae, 507 Animalia, 273 Fungi, 17 Unrecorded, 7 Protozoa, 4 Chromista. 12 distinct Species records are shown.
Collected by A E WOODHEAD, A. A. Eaton, A. B. Seymour and others. Each is a
physical object with a catalogue
number, and each entry opens the museum's record. This is what was
collected and kept, not a survey of what lives here - nothing can be
concluded from a species being absent.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The federal mineral resources record lists
17 workings within 5 miles of Old Stone Church: 12 past producers, 4 producers, 1 prospect.
4 still produce. What was taken out: Sand and Gravel, Construction, Peat, Iron, Zinc. Distance is straight-line from the
map coordinates, so a quarry counted here may appear on a neighbouring
settlement's page as well.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The National Weather Service names
West Boylston, the town this property stands in, in 6 storm reports between 2001 and 2022: 3 thunderstorm wind, 1 hail, 1 flood, 1 flash flood.
No death or injury is recorded in these reports. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office
filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date
opens the federal record of that event.
In West Boylston, the Fire Department showed a Facebook photo of a driveway and part of a road was washed out by flood waters, with a white sedan hanging over the washed out road. Exact street unknown.
No historic map-sheet match is published
for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs
a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary.
Browse the county's mapped places while that work is
pending.
From the nomination file
1,948 words on record
When this property was proposed for the
National Register, someone wrote the case for it: what the building is,
and why it matters. That document is a federal record in the public domain.
It is quoted below word for word, never summarised. The text was read off the scanned case file by machine, so the
occasional stray character is the recogniser's and the 1970s
typewriter's.
Description of the property
The granite ashlar "Old Stone Church" stands near the shore of the Wachusett Reservoir in a sloping meadow scattered with tall, deciduous trees. A crenellated entrance tower projects from the north corner, of this rectangular building whose long and steeply pitched roof is pierced by small triangular dormers. The side facades have two ranges of rectangular windows which define the first and basement stories. part by the lintels of the basement windows, visually separates the basement from the auditorium area. Within each gable is located etther a round or an HEossiun atat idhten sach gal On each elevation a granite course, formed in arched opening (formerly windows).
Butresses project from the corner of each exposed wall of the tower and from each end of the long walls where they extend three quarters of the wall height. On the gable ends the fenestration consists of large openings centered within the gable and narrow rectangular windows located at the basement and first story levels. The opening in the main gable end is round and louvered, outlined by granite block voussoirs, and windows are evenly spaced on the wall at the first story level. The opposite end contains an elliptically arched opening and, at the basement level, the windows are spaced in pairs. The side walls of the church contain two ranges of rectangular windows, one at the basement and the other at the first story level.
On the wall facing the Reservoir each range contains eight windows which are spaced in pairs. On the opposite side, the first story wall contains only six windows due to the projecting tower, while at the basement level,, the range is incom- plete and the windows differ in size, due to the slope of the land.
The "Old Stone Church" is the only structure of the old center of West Boylston remaining on its original site. Recognizing the significance of the Church, which symbolizes the community as it existed prior to 1895, the twon has made it the major feature in the town seal. The Baptists constructed the church in 1891 of hand-cut stone from a local quarry at Malden Hill. It overlooks a section of the old town that was inundated by the construction of the Wachusetts Reservoir. This was the largest construction of its kind in the United States when the project started in 1895. To the residents of West Boylston the church is a link with the past, tragic in that this is the only building of the old center to remain after sixty percent of the town's land was flooded.
To the visitor, the church, which resembles an English country church, is part of a picturesque 19th century landscape, beautiful in its setting on a point of meadow at the reservoir's shore and against the evergreen background of the watershed. ECEIVED JAN 1 O 1973 NATIONAL REGISTER
Quoted from the National Register nomination
for reference 73000329, 10 pages, held by the National Archives in Record
Group 79. See the
catalogue record.
Listed places nearby
6 within 8 miles
Other National Register properties close
enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both
positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties
to their map sheets.
Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.
Specimens. Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), https://www.gbif.org/. Only records licensed CC0 or CC BY are used. Records licensed CC BY-NC are excluded because this site carries advertising. Images are checked individually and any whose licence is non-commercial, no-derivatives or unreadable is refused.
Mines and quarries. USGS Mineral Resources Data System (MRDS) https://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105.
Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.
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