Living in Burncoat, Worcester, MA

About Burncoat

Where it is

Burncoat has no official city boundary. Wikipedia lists it among the North Worcester neighborhoods; its documented landmarks stand along Burncoat Street, including the National Register-listed Amos Flagg House (246 Burncoat Street), which its article places in northeastern Worcester. Burncoat (North) Park lies just north of I-290 and Brittan Square, and the Burncoat Street Playground at 524 Burncoat Street, between Burncoat and West Boylston Streets, is the city's northernmost public park.

Burncoat Street follows a route older than the city around it. The Massachusetts Historical Commission's survey of Worcester lists a northeast trail toward the Nashua River, inferred along Burncoat Street, in the period before European settlement, and records that Native trails stayed in use between 1620 and 1675, with Burncoat Street serving as the Lancaster Way. The street's National Register-listed house is the Amos Flagg House at 246 Burncoat Street, a story-and-a-half timber-frame house with a side-gable roof and central chimney, built about 1748, probably by Alan Flagg, on a 50-acre parcel sold or mortgaged to Jonas Gale in 1748, and listed on the National Register in 1980.

Orchards and farms along the road later gave way to houses. Preservation Worcester dates the mortared stone walls on the east side of Burncoat Street, from Thorndyke Road north to Devens Road, to between 1900 and 1910, built to mark the entrances to orchards and farms on Burncoat Plain; cast-in-place concrete piers flank each side street, and the walls now separate Burncoat Street from the residential side streets that developed to its east. The survey behind Worcester's 1980 Multiple Resource Area nomination names Burncoat Street, with the city's west side, as the place of the largest expansion of single-family houses in the period it dates 1890 to 1950.

The city bought land for a park here in 1889. North Park, renamed Burncoat Park in 1910 according to Park Spirit of Worcester, gained Western Pond in 1898, the Boulder Bridge in 1901, a playground in 1926 and a hockey rink in 1930. In 1962 the Commonwealth took 8.2 acres of it for the I-290 expressway, and Park Spirit records that about 4 acres of parkland were also given to the school department for Wawecus Elementary School. Burncoat Street now carries WRTA Route 14 and holds Burncoat Middle School (135) and Burncoat High School (179), and a Burncoat/Greendale neighborhood meeting on the city's calendar in March 2025 was held at St. Michael's on-the-Heights, 340 Burncoat Street.

Homes in Burncoat

The survey for Worcester's 1977-78 Multiple Resource Area National Register nomination names Burncoat Street, with the city's west side, as the place of the largest expansion of single-family houses between 1890 and 1950. Preservation Worcester records the 1900-1910 stone walls along Burncoat Street as entrances to former orchard and farm land on Burncoat Plain, with residential streets now running parallel to the east. No published count of housing types or ownership for Burncoat alone was found.