Bancroft Tower and the Salisbury Legacy

At the top of Prospect Hill on the north side of Worcester, rising above the tree line of Salisbury Park, stands a stone tower that looks like it belongs in a medieval English countryside. It was built in nineteen hundred and is called Bancroft Tower, named in honor of one of the most accomplished men this city has ever produced.

George Bancroft was born in Worcester in eighteen hundred. He went on to become a historian of genuinely epic ambitions: he spent decades writing a ten-volume history of the United States that traced the country's development from its colonial origins, and he is sometimes called the father of American history. Beyond his scholarship, he served as Secretary of the Navy under President James Polk from eighteen forty-five to eighteen forty-six, and during that tenure he founded the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis.

The tower was commissioned by Stephen Salisbury the Third, the last significant member of the Salisbury family that had dominated Worcester's civic and commercial life for over a century. The Salisburys had arrived in Worcester in the seventeen seventies and built their wealth through trade and real estate. Stephen the Third hired local architects and spent fifteen thousand dollars on the tower as a tribute to Bancroft, who had been a childhood friend of his father's.

The tower is fifty-six feet tall and built of local boulders, cobblestones, and rock-faced granite. Salisbury bequeathed the park to the Worcester Art Museum upon his death in nineteen oh seven, and the museum passed it on to the city's parks department years later.

You can climb the tower and look out over Worcester from the same height where the city's wealthiest family once chose to memorialize its oldest friend.