Boylston Hall stood where the current Congregational Church now stands.
At a meeting in 1818 Ward N. Boylston offered the town $500, “to be loaned out to industrious young men (no mention of women) of known good character” at 6% until it amounted to a sum that should “be deemed sufficient to build a handsome and suitable Town Meeting House.”
So ably was this money handled by the Trustees that in 1842 it amounted to $1800. The town voted to use this sum to erect a one story building 64×40 feet on the site now occupied by the church, but facing Mrs. R. J. Gregory’s house (10 Mountain Road). The first town meeting in that hall was held in 1843.
For a time Boylston Hall housed a private school, each pupil paying his share of the teacher’s salary. One of them wrote, “As the only seats were settees, we made our own desks with a cleat to fasten over the back of the settee in front. If all the fellows from that settee happened to be reciting, it often tipped back and dropped our books on the floor. ”
Mrs. H. P. Houghton remembers as a child attending Christmas exercises in the hall the evening of December 25 1882 and hearing the master of ceremonies announce that Santa Claus had presented the Sunday School Superintendent, J. C. F. Mirick, with his first-born child, Edith, ushered into this world at 6:45 pm by Dr. Joseph West (father of Mrs. Arey and Miss Gertrude West).
The next year in September a fire, probably incendiary, which started in a small store near the hall, spread to the latter, Boylston Hall, destroying it as well as the property of the Princeton Cornet Band housed therein and the Cattle-show equipment of the Farmers and Mechanics Association. Mr. H. C. Beaman. an eye-witness of the fire, reports that he “was amused to see Deacon Edwin Grimes valiantly fighting the blaze with a little hand pump and a pail of water.”
Thereafter, for a while town meetings were held in the dance hall of the Wachusett House barn.
Miss Ethel Mirick
This was copied from the Princeton News, Vol. II, No. 2, dated February 1, 1953 and was updated/clarified by the PHS in August 2015.