Building Route 128 in Wakefield and Reading
These photographs, of places that were taken for the new highway in these two towns, are exclusive to this web site, having not been included in Building Route 128, due to production issues.
According to the Reading Historical Commission’s book
on their town,
At Wood’s End, for twenty years beginning in 1898 the
Quannapowitt
Agricultural Association held a fair near the Wakefield
town line,
on a 19-acre site just off Salem Street. One of
the highlight’s of the
fair were the horse races, held on an oval track that
straddled
the neighboring towns of Reading and Wakefield.
In the early 1920s, a developer advertised a new housing
development that planned to create on the site of the
old
fairgrounds. Precisely over the location of the
oval race
track would be a road named, appropriately enough,
Track Road. According to At Wood End, ten years
later
only a third of the 100 lots were sold, and eventually
the Wakefield half the development (which runs along
the center of Track Road) would be razed, anyway, to
make way for Route 128 near the Route 129 interchange.
Lowell Street looking northwest from Quannapowitt in the
winter of 1950,
just before the construction of Route 128 through Wakefield.
(Courtesy
of the
Wakefield Item)
A view of the future site of Route 128 as we look north
on North Main
Street to Bay State Road in Wakefield, just before construction
began that
would change this view forever. (Courtesy of
the Wakefield Item)
Shortly after the completion of Route 128 in Wakefield
in 1951,
this photo was taken looking up North Avenue towards
the highway
overpass. Quannaopowitt Road can be seen merging
from the right.
(Courtesy of the Wakefield Item)
"Dub" Englund drives his tractor on the family's Reading
farm, which would eventually be taken for an interchange between Route 128 and Main
Street (Route 28) in Reading.
Across from the Englund farm was King's Vegetable stand
on Main Street
(Route 28). It would be taken, as well, for the
construction of Route 128.