Worcester City Hall is a stone muncipal building typical of large cities. It is elaborate in architectural detail with palladin windows on the 2nd story. Centered is a tower with a clock.
The Pakachoag tribe of the Nipmuc nation of Native Americans were the indigenous settlers of the area. They called it Quinsigamond, meaning "fishing place for pickerel." Lake Quinsigamond provided fine hunting and fishing grounds a short distance from their main village near a spring on Pakachoag Hill in what is now Auburn. Mt. Wachusett was their sacred place.
Worcester was first settled by the English in 1673, but the modest settlement of six or seven houses was burned to the ground during King Philip's War on December 2, 1675, when settlers were either killed or driven off. The town was subsequently resettled and was incorporated in 1684. On September 10 of that year, Daniel Gookin and others petitioned to have the town's name officially changed from Quinsigamond to Worcester. However, its inhabitants were still vulnerable to attack, and some, such as Samuel Lenorson Jr., were taken hostage by natives during the 1690s. When Queen Anne's War started in 1702, the town was again abandoned by its English inhabitants except for Diggory Sargent. Sargent was later tomahawked, as was his wife, who was too weak to make the journey on foot to Canada. Their children were taken to Canada and survived.
In 1713, Worcester was resettled for the third time, permanently, by Jonas Rice (1673–1753), a descendant of Edmund Rice of Sudbury. Jonas Rice held many offices and was elected to represent Worcester in the General Court of Massachusetts but died before he could serve. His farm was located atop Union Hill and a commemorative Massachusetts Tercentenary historic marker stands as a reminder where Plantation St. and Massasoit Rd. intersect.
Named after the historic city of Worcester, England, Worcester [= War + cester camp] was incorporated as a town in 1722 and chartered as a city in 1848. When the government of Worcester County was established on April 2, 1731, Worcester was chosen as shire town (later known as a county seat). From that date until the dissolution of the county government on July 1, 1998, it was the only county seat.
Worcester Common in 1907, established in 1669As political tensions rose in the months before the Revolution, Worcester served as a center of revolutionary activity. Because it was an important munitions depot, Worcester was targeted for attack by Loyalist general Thomas Gage. However, officers sent secretly to inspect the munitions depot were discovered by Patriot Timothy Bigelow. General Gage then decided to move on to the second munitions depot in Lexington. In 1775, determining that Boston was too dangerous, Isaiah Thomas moved his newspaper, the Massachusetts Spy, to Worcester. The Massachusetts Spy was one of the few papers published continuously during the Revolution. On July 14, 1776, Isaiah Thomas, intercepting the packet from Philadelphia to Boston, performed the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence ever in front of Worcester City Hall. In 1812, Thomas founded the American Antiquarian Society, a research library holding nearly two-thirds of the items known to have been printed in America from 1639 through 1820. The Society's holdings from 1821 to 1876 compare favorably with those of the Library of Congress and other major research libraries
Known for innovation in commerce, industry, education, and social thought, Worcester and the nearby Blackstone Valley claim their historic role as birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution. Ichabod Washburn, an early industrialist, developed a process for extruding steel wire. His company, Washburn & Moen, founded in 1831, was "the company that 'barbed-wire fenced the American West,'" and held the battle lines during World War I. In 1840, Loring Coes invented the monkey wrench. In the 1850s, George Crompton and L.J. & F.B. Knowles founded companies that manufactured textile looms which drove the Industrial Revolution[citation needed]. Another Worcester innovator, physician Russel Howes, invented the first envelope folding machine in 1856. It could produce 25,000 envelopes in ten hours, using three operators.
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