Living in Quinsigamond Village, Worcester, MA

About Quinsigamond Village

Where it is

Quinsigamond Village lies in South Worcester, in a narrow valley carved by the Blackstone River between two steep ridges. It spread along Millbury Street, and Blackstone Gateway Park on McKeon Road sits at its edge.

Quinsigamond is an Algonquian name, translated as 'pickerel fishing place', that first belonged to the lake between Worcester and Shrewsbury and then to the English settlement that became Worcester. The Massachusetts Historical Commission's survey suggests that a Native village at Quinsigamond served as a gathering place before settlement. Industry came early to this stretch of the Blackstone River: in 1794 the printer Isaiah Thomas built a two-vat paper mill at Quinsigamond Village, and in 1846 Ichabod and Charles Washburn bought the site for their South Works, an iron rolling mill and wire works. By 1900 the South Works covered the land between Millbury and Ballard Streets; American Steel & Wire bought it in 1899, it became part of U.S. Steel by 1901, and it closed in 1977 as the last major steel mill in New England.

The village grew along Millbury Street as mill workers looked for housing near the works, much of it in three-deckers, alongside earlier houses such as the Berg and Dahlin double cottages of 1875 to 1878. Institutions followed: the Quinsigamond United Methodist Church on Stebbins Street (1884), the First Swedish Co-op Store (1883), a Swedish Congregational chapel on Greenwood Street (1891), Lutheran Emmanuel Church on Greenwood Street (1898 to 1899), the Romanesque Quinsigamond Firehouse (1891 to 1892) and the Quinsigamond School buildings of the 1890s. In 1913 Andrew Carnegie came to lay the cornerstone of the Quinsigamond Branch Library, one of three city branches built partly with his grant. Streetcars ran from City Hall to Quinsigamond via Front, Green and Millbury Streets by 1886, and the company's final extension, around September 1917, added 0.9 miles of track on the Quinsigamond Village line to the Millbury town line.

The river is now the neighborhood's front door. Route 146 runs through the valley with an exit signed for Millbury Street and Quinsigamond Village, and the Massachusetts Turnpike-Route 146 interchange project opened the first 2.5-mile section of the Blackstone River Bikeway, from Worcester to Millbury, in 2005. On the village's edge, the city's 30-acre Blackstone Gateway Park has about half a mile of accessible paths, boardwalks and three bridges over the Middle River, and the Blackstone Heritage Corridor's visitor center opened beside it on a former brownfield on October 27, 2018, and was planned as the Central Region headquarters of the state Department of Conservation and Recreation. The 1892 firehouse, replaced in 1994 by a district station on McKeon Road, stands vacant.

Homes in Quinsigamond Village

The Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor's walking tour describes the village spreading along Millbury Street as workers sought housing near the mills, with many households in three-deckers by 1900, and earlier houses such as the Berg and Dahlin double cottages (1875 to 1878) and the George Reeves House (1857 to 1862), built for a Washburn & Moen foreman. No current count of housing types or ownership for the neighborhood alone was found.