Living in Boylston, MA

About Boylston

Europeans first settled the northern part of present-day Boylston around 1705, near Sawyer's Mills on the Nashua River intervale, and permanent settlement followed after 1718, according to the Massachusetts Historical Commission's 1983 survey. The area became the second precinct of Shrewsbury in 1742, gathered a church and built its first meetinghouse in 1743, and was incorporated as the town of Boylston in 1786. Part of the town was set off as West Boylston in 1808. Sawyer's Mills was the industrial center from the mid-1700s, with saw, grist and fulling mills, a wire mill and, by 1855, a cotton mill employing 50. The Wachusett Reservoir, completed in 1905, flooded the Nashua valley and Sawyer's Mills with it: 302 people were displaced, 46 dwellings were moved or destroyed, and the town's population fell by more than half within five years.

The land falls from over 700 feet near the Shrewsbury line to just under 400 feet at the reservoir shore, and the town's roads radiate from the common in Boylston Center. There the granite town hall of 1830, paid for by the Boston merchant Ward Nicholas Boylston, now houses the Boylston Historical Society's museum; the public library is in a 1904 fieldstone building by the Worcester architects Fuller & Delano; and Hastings' Tavern, a brick five-bay building, went up in the center in 1818. The temperance lecturer John B. Gough built his Italianate house, Hillside, on Main Street in 1848. An electric streetcar opened along Main Street from Worcester to Clinton in 1898 and was gone by the 1920s; Main Street was rebuilt as Route 70 in the early 1930s, and School Street (Route 140) became the road to Shrewsbury. Morningdale, in the southwest, began to develop as a streetcar suburb of Worcester in the decades before 1915.

Boylston's 2021 Housing Production Plan counts 1,823 housing units, 74% of them detached single-family homes and 83.3% of occupied units owner occupied (2015 to 2019 American Community Survey). By the plan's year-built table, 16% of units date from 2000 or later. The zoning bylaw caps new development at 20 permits a year, allows buildings of more than two units only in the Mixed Use Industrial district by special permit, and, after a June 7, 2021 Town Meeting vote, requires 10% affordable units in developments of more than eight units. Boylston does not appear on the state's list of MBTA Communities. The 293.6-acre Hillside property on Main Street, a former Digital Equipment Corporation training center, now holds the municipal offices, fields and trails; a master plan for the site, funded by a state One Stop for Growth grant, explored community space, housing, small business, trails and conservation and was scheduled to finish in June 2026.

Homes in Boylston

The town's 2021 Housing Production Plan, prepared with the Central Massachusetts Regional Planning Commission, counts 1,823 housing units (2015 to 2019 American Community Survey), 74% of them detached single-family homes and 9% attached single-family homes. Of occupied units, 83.3% (1,499) were owner occupied and 16.7% (300) renter occupied. By year built, 15% of units date from 1939 or earlier, 18% from 1940 to 1959, 26% from 1960 to 1979, 25% from 1980 to 1999, 11% from 2000 to 2009 and 5% from 2010 or later. The plan lists 30 units, or 1.7%, on the state's Subsidized Housing Inventory, including the 24 rental units of Sun Bank Village on Heritage Lane.