Thursday, January 6, 2011

A Wachusett-area relic

For those who grew up in the Wachusett area, you may remember the semi-famous stone church. This building is all that remains of the old town of West Boylston Ma. With the creation of the Wachusett reservoir, engineers flooded the old downtown.



In 1897, the Nashua River above the town of Clinton was impounded by the Wachusett Dam. Six and 1/2 square miles were flooded in the towns of Boylston, West Boylston, Clinton and Sterling. The church now sits just feet from the reservoir that engulfed everything else around it.



Here the stone structure sits, an abandoned skeleton of its former self. The building is far from forgotten though. On Christmas day, when my wife and I took a brief reprieve from the holiday hubbub to visit the site, we encountered at least eight other groups and families stopping by the church for no clear reason we could determine.



Not deterred by the horde of roosting pigeons above us, Andrea gladly served as my model as I experimented with lighting and composition inside the hollow structure.

I have to say, the area around the church is very peaceful. The church is surrounded by water on 3 sides, with fairly picturesque alpine and deciduous forest lining the shores of the water. It's also on a less than high-traffic road through a fairly sleepy section of West Boylston. I find there are less and less places like this that I find, and I hope that it remains standing for many more generations to stop by, if not for historical sake, but to just escape it all for a bit.

2 comments:

  1. Wow, I'd better alert Mike about this place.... except he might think the building's in too good a shape for him ;-)

    ReplyDelete