As with many communities in New England, Groton is rich in history. Located 40 miles north-northwest of Boston, this small town encapsulates more than three and a half centuries since it was founded in 1655. Its history is a rich and varied narrative of people, places, things, and events.

Diagonally across Main Street from Groton’s Town Hall is a two-and-a-half story Italianate-styled house — an impressive-looking residence not completely out of place in many old Massachusetts communities. What was once the private home of an August Grotonian is now the repository and showplace of all things related to Groton history.

Development Director Beverly Smith describes the space this way: “Everybody has history. Littleton has history. Harvard [Mass.] has history. We have a governor’s house.”

Groton History Center, more formally known as the Groton Historical Society, is located in the Governor George S. Boutwell House, built in 1851 when Boutwell (1818 – 1905) was serving his single two-year term as the 20th Governor of Massachusetts. In his eighty-seven-year life, George Boutwell was a store clerk, lawyer, Governor, first Commissioner of Internal Revenue (under President Abraham Lincoln), member of the U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury (under President Ulysses S. Grant), and U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. As a Congressman, Boutwell was one of the House managers in the second impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson in 1868. Following his political career, Boutwell practiced international and patent law. He died in 1905, highly respected by all who knew him.

Boutwell’s daughter, Georgianna, continued to live in the house until her death in 1933. In her will, she bequeathed the house and property to the Groton Historical Society. The building was added to the National Register of Historical Places in 2005. In 2016, the GHS adopted the trade name Groton History Center, “to better reflect our role as an open, welcoming historical and cultural organization.”

As a visitor enters the house, to the left of the front hall is a room that runs the length of the original residence. Large windows take up the front and one side, bathing the room in beautiful light. The walls are covered in a striking red wallpaper, formal but not unwelcoming.

“This room would have been used for formal entertaining,” says Kara Fossey, GHS Executive Director since 2007. “In 1869, President Grant came to Groton. George was his Secretary of the Treasury … Grant visited here and they had a little reception for him in here. They had both the back door and the front doors open, and people would come in.”

Beverly Smith adds, “We love that there is actual documentation of Grant coming up from the [railroad] station, down Station Avenue, and George greeted him. They had a band playing. Between the two of them, they shook 3,000 hands.”

Three other rooms on the first floor also deserve a visit. At the front, to the right of the front hall, is a small parlor with walls of a striking blue. From there, a visitor can walk through to the formal dining room. The windows along one side give the room, in daytime, a soft, warm light. It is a short passage from there through the china pantry into the kitchen.

The kitchen, as it may have looked in the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, is dominated by a great, ornate iron wood-burning range. Not original to the house, the stove was installed in 2013, as was the period soapstone sink on the other side of the room. Butter churns, a storage barrel, and a wooden icebox (precursor to the refrigerator) complete the look of the period kitchen.

The carpeted stairway in the front hall takes visitors up to the second-floor rooms. The first stop there is a bedroom dominated by a magnificent 19th-century sleigh bed. Says Kara Fossey, referring to the 1869 visit, “President Grant slept here for that one night.” Later, until the end of her life, this room was Georgianna’s bedroom.

A small room that overlooks the street features a massive, framed period map of the town of Groton  on one side wall. “This is the favorite room,” says Beverly Smith, “A lot of people love to come in here and see the map. … You can go up and say, ‘Oh, I live here.’”

The most impressive second floor room, however, is George Boutwell’s study. Along two walls are barrister bookcases holding his personal library. In the corner opposite the door are a simple wooden standing desk and stool. He likely used this desk in the Main Street store while he was a clerk and which he ran while he was learning the law from Groton attorney Bradford Russell, whose office was on the floor above. Above the fireplace is a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant as a four-star general.

In the center of the study are Boutwell’s partner’s desk and chair that he used in his U.S. Senate office. It is said that Boutwell sometimes liked to look down Station Avenue, across Main Street, waving to people walking up from the railroad station.

The house serves as both the repository for the GHS’s holdings and as a public space to display a varied range of items: documents, records, correspondence, photographs, maps, furniture, glassware among them — even a town hearse. The real value to the community is as an active and visible space, drawing the public in.

“Several people have noticed that they feel like there’s a huge energy building with us,” says Beverly Smith. “They come in and they say something’s different…So we’re at another crossroads, I think. We want you to take notice and understand how we operate, and what we do… It’s not [just] about Boutwell and so on, but a sense of place around the artist community here in Groton.” She sees Groton History Center as an anchor on Main Street.

Kara Fossey expands: “A lot of it does focus on what Beverly mentioned about breaking free of that stereotype of historical societies being kind of closed off and old.”

A look at their website will show the range of events open to all at Groton History Center. In addition to the periodic open houses, there are also talks open to the public, such as “Wicked Pissed: New England’s Most Famous Feuds”, presented by popular Chronicle reporter Ted Reinstein, and “Full Moon Fête” at the end of October.

In a more Groton-centered presentation, author Priscilla Hutt Williams talked about a little-known local school, Lowthorpe, “… which was a landscape school for women,” says Kara Fossey, “that was started in, I think, 1901. … They stayed here in Groton until the 1940s, until they were absorbed by the Rhode Island School of Design.”

In a final example of cultural and historic outreach to their community, Groton History Center was gifted with a pair of mural panels that had come from a historic house in Groton. Indian Hill Music, now the Groton Hill Music Center, had purchased the circa 1791 Oliver Prescott House. Inside, several of the walls had been decorated with murals signed by J. D. Poor, circa 1835. Recent thought is that Jonathan D. Poor, a nephew and student of famed muralist Rufus Poor (1792–1884), may have been the more prolific artist of the two. 

Two of the murals were removed and donated to the Groton History Center. They are now on display, on a long-term loan, in the lobby of the Groton Inn, just a short walk up Main Street from the Center. The display affords a taste of 19th century American art in a venue accessible to a larger audience.

In the hands of current staff, Board of Directors, and volunteers, the Groton History Center has a bright and active future ahead of it —  a gem in the midst of the downtown sure to continue to attract attention.

For more information on the Groton History Center, upcoming events and opportunities, check out the website: www.grotonhistory.org.

Photos by David Watts, Jr.