Built in 1885 in the Romanesque Revival architecture. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in
1986. 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
“Ware Town Hall is a historic town hall at Main and West Streets in Ware, Massachusetts. It was built in 1885 to a design by the architectural firm of Hartwell and Richardson, and is a prominent local example of Romanesque Revival architecture.”
Wikipedia article Ware Town Hall, CC BY-SA 4.0.
one of 32 National Register listings in Hampshire County · listed in 1986 · category: Building · built in 1885, Romanesque Revival architecture, by Hartwell and Richardson.
National Register reference number.86001403- 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.
The eastern band of schists leaves the county at the south line of Orange, and, traversing Worcester County for a long distance, reenters the area of the map in Ware and crosses Palmer and Monson. The fourfold division of the schists, which has been persistent over so large an area, and which seems to be somewhat less distinct at the beginning of this band in Orange, here fails entirely. It is reduced to a twofold division of amphibolites below, resting directly upon the Monson gneiss, and a great volume of fibrolitic mica-schists, the lower portion of which may represent the whetstone-schist, but in which no persistent lithological distinctions can be established.
Mica-schist from Ware. In the bluff near the contact of mica-schist on hornblende-schist, 175 rods southwest of B. Bond's house, is seen a black, fine-grained schist with wavy, shining lamination surface, which may almost be called an argillite, with rarely deep-red garnets and large porphyi-itic spots of white feldspar.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The
federal wildfire occurrence database
lists 34 fires within 5 miles of Ware Town Hall between
2015 and 2020, burning about 17 acres in total. 7 started naturally. None was 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
Equipment and vehicle use
10
Missing data/not specified/undetermined
9
Natural
7
Recreation and ceremony
4
Debris and open burning
3
Smoking
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 421 specimens
collected within 10 miles of Ware Town Hall between 1857 and
1975: 225 Animalia, 125 Plantae, 70 Fungi, 1 Chromista. 12 distinct Species records are shown.
Collected by A. C. Gibson, A. Lavallee, A. P. Chute 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
6 workings within 5 miles of Ware Town Hall: 4 past producers, 1 producer, 1 plant.
2 still produce. What was taken out: Sand and Gravel, Construction. 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
Ware, the town this property stands in, in 28 storm reports between 1995 and 2025: 18 thunderstorm wind, 4 flood, 3 hail, 2 lightning.
The reports record 3 injuries. 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.
Lightning struck the medical office building on the campus of Baystate Mary Lane Hospital in Ware, blowing out the building's electrical panel. In addition, three people who were on the telephone at the time of the strike reported feeling numbness and a tingling in their arms. All three walked over to the hospital to be checked out and were fine.
In Amherst, a newly paved driveway washed out onto Bay Road. There was substantial damage on the University of Massachusetts-Amherst campus. In the Morrill Science Center IV, a transformer blew up when one foot of water flooded the room where it is housed. Two to six feet of water flooded portions of the Murray D. Lincoln campus center damaging meeting rooms, offices, and one escalator. Finally, in the Boyden Gymnasium, floodwaters caused a concrete gym floor to heave. In Ware, Anderson Road was flooded out, closing the road.
Numerous trees and wires were downed in Ware, including along Gilbertville and Campbell Roads. Six other roads were also closed due to the downed trees and wires.
At 1018 AM EST, an amateur radio operator reported flooding related to an ice jam on the Ware River in Ware. The Ware Airport was flooded, and a portion of Church Street was closed.
One lane of Route 9, starting at the Belchertown line, was closed due to flooding. In addition, several small streams and rivers went into flood during this time. No damage was reported with this flooding. These rivers included: the West branch of the Westfield River at Huntington, the Mill River, and the Connecticut River at Northampton.
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
5,287 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
Located on the southeast corner of Main and West Streets, on one of Ware Village's two main intersections, the Ware Town Hall is a square-towered red brick and stone Romanesque Revival structure originally constructed in 1885-1886. A secondary entrance and stair tower added on the west side in 1904 were designed by the same architectural firm as the original structure, and are closely compatible with it. A 1935 fire burned out the rear of the building, which was rebuilt with a rear addition, again in a closely compatible style. The plan of the building is an elaborate rectangle dominated by the tall, steeply roofed square tower at the right front.
The main block of the building is capped by a steep hip-and-ridge roof; it is 1 1/2 stories tall on the front elevation, with the basement level fully exposed at the rear of the sloping lot. Originally the building extended only as far as the right side bow bay; in the 1935 rebuilding the structure was extended by approximately 40 feet. Part of the addition is contained under an extension of the original roof, and part - a shallow two-story section - under a flat roof with a metal balcony. The red brick structural fabric is richly ornamented with reddish sandstone and decorative brick. The Romanesque Revival style betrays a strong -Richardsonian influence in the 1ow-arched doorways and in the rugged treatment of the surface.
The fenestration is dominated by tall, broad, round-arched mult1-light windows which penetrate the side elevations and light the main floor auditorium. Rectangular windows also occur, particularly on the basement office level. Stone window hoods,sills, and other elements of trim are rock-faced and deeply-outset.
(in one paragraph) H.P. Cummings Co. Construction. The Ware Town Hall is architecturally and historically significant as an excel1ent 1ocal example of the town hall form, with its hierarchy of public meeting space and administrative offices, handsomely rendered in the late 19th century Romanesque Revival style. firm of Hartwell & Richardson, the red brick and sandstone building received a highly compatible addition designed by the same firm in 1904 and a sensitive 1 830 by a he rear extension designed after 1935 by a local architect Thomas E. Madigan.
the exterior and the main hall maintain very good integrity of material and design, the Town Hall is able to express with considerable effectiveness not only the aesthetic values of the late, Richardson-influenced Romanesque style, but also the persistent importance of participatory local government in New England town life. For these reasons the Ware Town Hall is nominated to the National Register on the basis of criterion C, as it embodies distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction; and criterion A, as it is associated with events significant to the local past. In 18th century Ware, the town meetings that governed local affairs were held in the First Congregational Meetinghouse at Ware Center.
This community, several miles west of the modern population center, grew up around the 1750 church; it was the geographical, political, and population center of the town through the early 19th century. replaced the former small mills at the falls of the Ware River in the 1820s the town embarked on a period of growth which continued through the rest of the century. By 1850, the social and economic centrality of Ware Center was completely eclipsed.
Quoted from the National Register nomination
for reference 86001403, 22 pages, held by the National Archives in Record
Group 79. See the
catalogue record.
Listed places nearby
2 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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