Living in Grafton Hill, Worcester, MA

About Grafton Hill

Where it is

Grafton Hill rises in southeastern Worcester, anchored by Grafton Street and Providence Street; its lower western slope reaches Dorchester Street, and the city places Mulcahy Field, at 158 Dorchester Street, in the neighborhood. Massasoit Road spans Grafton Hill, Union Hill and the Broad Meadow Brook area.

Grafton Hill takes its name from the road that climbs it. The hill, once called Sagatabscot, is counted by the city among Worcester's seven hills, and Grafton Street was an early route out of the town center: the Blackstone Canal, which opened in 1828, ran south parallel to Summer and Grafton Streets, and the Massachusetts Historical Commission's survey records a brewery built at the head of Grafton Street between 1830 and 1870. Public transit followed the street up the hill. Worcester's first horsecar line, opened in 1863, had a spur on Front and Grafton Streets to the railroad station, and a streetcar line on Grafton Street opened in 1890.

The streetcar years shaped what stands on the hill today. The Grafton Street School, on the north side of Grafton Street between Fay and Wall Streets, opened in 1879 and gained a second building in 1899; its Wikipedia article notes that the area began as suburban and filled in with triple-deckers, which drove the school's expansions. The National Register nomination for the Patrick McGrath Three-Decker, a Queen Anne house of about 1894 on Dorchester Street, describes it as part of a row of similar houses on the lower western slope of Grafton Hill, in the earliest core of three-decker building in the Grafton Hill and Vernon Hill area. North of Grafton Street, four Colonial Revival three-deckers of about 1928 on Ingleside Avenue, which runs north from Grafton Street to Plantation Street, form a small National Register historic district.

The city marked the neighborhood formally in October 2025, when it installed a granite Grafton Hill sign on Grafton Street, paid for by the CSX Community Investment Fund. Recreation centers on Mulcahy Field on Dorchester Street, a city ballfield and playground, and a Grafton Hill neighborhood meeting on the city's calendar in April 2025 was held in the community room at Mass Audubon's Broad Meadow Brook sanctuary on Massasoit Road, a large urban sanctuary of woods, fields, streams and marsh.

Homes in Grafton Hill

The National Register record for the Patrick McGrath Three-Decker places Dorchester Street, on Grafton Hill's lower western slope, in the earliest core of Worcester's three-decker development, built up as rows of similar houses in the 1890s. Later three-deckers on the hill, such as the four c. 1928 houses of the Ingleside Avenue Historic District, carry Colonial Revival details. No published count of housing types or ownership for Grafton Hill alone was found.