Généalogie de la famille de PRELLE de la NIEPPE

Also contributing to the thriving local business was the fact that Silas Holman and his son, Gen. Amory Holman, who in 1818 succeeded his father as owner of the most well-known establishment, the Holman Inn, had controlling interests in some of the regional stagecoach lies. This arrangement ensured not only that stagecoaches would stop here, but that the Holmans/' other enterprises, including a blacksmith shop and harness shop, would have plenty of work servicing the coaches and horses. Then, in 1827, Amory Holman founded the large Bolton & Lancaster Stage Company, with headquarters at the inn. Business again increased when, in 1832, Gen. Holman received contracts to carry the mail from Boston to Albany and to Brattleboro, Vermont. He eventually sublet twelve subsidiary lines to his coach drivers. As the Holman Inn grew and its business expanded, it employed a sizeable staff, some of whom boarded or rented space in other buildings that the Holmans constructed. The earliest of the Holman rental houses is the Holman Annex at 746 Main Street (Map #57), believed to have been built at the beginning of the nineteenth century while Silas Holman was still owner of the inn, and possibly later raised to two stories and updated with early Greek Revival detailing. The double-house at 720 Main Street (Map #46), probably put up in the 1830s by the owners of the brick store, was apparently the prototype for two others that Amory Holman built a few years afterward at 726/728 (Map #50), and 730 Main Street (Map #52) out of material from an enormous horse shed for the inn that had stood nearby on the south side of the road. (As many as ninety horses were kept on the grounds at one time). The two-story horse shed was torn down, however, as the railroad era dawned and the business of both the stagecoach and the inn went into a sharp decline. The two new double-houses, along with another that burned down, were called the /"Corporation Houses/" for the joint stock company formed by Amory Holman and twenty-one investors around 1837. The business of /"the corporation/" was the production of boots and shoes, and the tenants of these houses were apparently shoe-workers and their families. The Bolton Shoe Company, although it was never a large company, and was relatively short-lived, (by 1858 it had succumbed to regional competition and the absence of any nearby railroad), was Bolton center/'s main industrial enterprise of the mid-nineteenth century. Most of its stockholders were local Bolton men, including Amory Holman, Sherman Houghton, and brick-store-owner George Rice. Earlier attempts at Bolton center to manufacture goods for more than a local market had included a sizable turn--of the-nineteenth-century hat shop run by Capt. Samuel Blood (579 Main Street and his son, Edmund, at the east end of the district, a tannery operated by Simeon Cunningham (777 Main Street) and others just north of the intersection of Harvard Road from ca. 1806 through the 1850/'s, and significant home --production for the regional industry of tortoise-shell comb-making. The industrial production of those enterprises was relatively minor, however, and the lack of substantial water power had prevented other major industrial development in town. By contrast, the shoe company, formed at the end of the 1830s, was poised to take advantage of the advances in technology and production methods of the industrial revolution. The Bolton Shoe Company factory building still stands at 664 Main Street (Map #19). In addition, Amory Holman also built a three-story, 60-by-18-foot shoe-shop of his own, which stood behind 726/728 Great Road, and, like the /"corporation houses,/" was constructed out of material from the Holman Inn horse shed. In 1837, the value of Bolton/'s shoe production in an aggregation of small shops amounted to $6,000; by 1856, due largely to the output of the Bolton Shoe Company, it had grown to over $48,000. No railroad was ever built through the center of Bolton, however, and, just as the initial building of a railroad through Fitchburg led to the demise of the inn and stagecoach business, competition from larger mid-century regional mills that had the benefit of railroad access put an early end to Bolton/'s shoe industry. With the advent of the Civil War and the decline of the shoe company, development at the center, as elsewhere in town, came nearly to a standstill. The population had increased from 1255 in 1855 to 1802 in 1865, then dropped by nearly 500 by 1870, due largely to the loss of part of the town to Hudson in 1868. Only one house was constructed in the center district between 1855 and 1870, the vernacular Italianate gable-end cottage of the town/'s first dentist, Dr. Warren Houghton built about 1869 at 662 Main Street (Map #18), on part of the former Bolton Shoe Co. property that had been acquired by his father-in-law, Sherman Houghton of 674 Main Street. In 1870-71, another of Sherman Houghton/'s sons-in-law, carpenter William W. Robinson built a similar gable-end cottage for resale at 725 Main Street (Map #49), moving and converting one of the relocated shoe shops to a store and dwelling (later burned) just to its east. In 1874 the Holman Inn itself was torn down, and Civil-War veteran Charles Rich moved its ballroom wing east to become the house at 676 Main Street (Map #24). The Holman Inn harness shop was also converted to a dwelling (727 Main Street; Map #51). In 1880, a vernacular Italianate 2 1/2-story gable-end house, 733 Main Street, was built on the site of the inn. Source: http://www.townofbolton.com/pages/BoltonMA_HistComm/Significance?textPage=1