Living in Tatnuck, Worcester, MA

About Tatnuck

Where it is

Tatnuck is on Worcester's West Side around Tatnuck Square, the intersection of Pleasant and Chandler Streets. West Tatnuck, which Wikipedia lists as a separate West Side neighborhood, is where the Tatnuck streetcar line was carried in 1913 and where WRTA Route 6 runs via Chandler Street.

Tatnuck's name is older than the city. A Nipmuc place-name list gives 'at the great hill' as the meaning of Tatnit, listing Tatnuck as a variant spelling, and the Massachusetts Historical Commission's survey of Worcester records settlement along Tatnuck Brook in the west and suggests that a village at Tatnuck served as a gathering place before English settlement. By about 1830 the survey counts Tatnuck, at the Pleasant and Chandler Street intersection, among the small residential clusters on the edge of the town, and between 1830 and 1870 it lists Tatnuck among the places where textile mills were built on Worcester's streams.

The streetcar turned the crossroads into a square. The Worcester Consolidated Street Railway opened an extension of its Pleasant Street line to Tatnuck on May 30, 1899, pushed it 691 feet farther west in 1904, and carried it another 4,668 feet to West Tatnuck in August 1913. The route has survived as a bus: WRTA Route 2 runs to Tatnuck Square via Pleasant Street, and Route 6 runs to West Tatnuck via Chandler Street. Around the square on Pleasant Street stand the city's Tatnuck Square fire station at 1067, the First Congregational Church at 1070, where a monthly Tatnuck Square neighborhood meeting has been held, and the Worcester Public Library's Tatnuck Magnet Branch at 1083.

The neighborhood's best-known house predates the streetcar by almost a century. Liberty Farm, at 116 Mower Street, is a Federal-style farmhouse of about 1810 where the abolitionists and suffrage campaigners Abby Kelley Foster and Stephen Symonds Foster lived for most of their married life; they sheltered people escaping slavery and refused to pay property taxes because Abby could not vote. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1974 and remains a private residence.

Homes in Tatnuck

No published count of housing types or ownership for Tatnuck alone was found. The Massachusetts Historical Commission's survey records Tatnuck as one of the small residential clusters on the town's edge by about 1830, and its oldest landmark house, Liberty Farm, a c. 1810 Federal farmhouse, now stands in what its Wikipedia article calls a suburban area of western Worcester.