Millbrook Street
From Worcester Activist wiki
Also BIMELEK BROOK AND YE NEW ROAD
Following Winter snowstorms, tons of snow picked up in mid-Worcester are dumped into manholes at Lincoln square, Harding and Union streets.
It drops with a frozen “sloosh” into the city’s largest underground sewer.
Once the sewer was the Blackstone Canal. Before that the Blackstone River.
Before that Swift River, and in older documents, Bimelech, or Bimelek Brook.
In its upper reaches, the stream was known as Fort River, because of the fort on the west bank between the easterly ends of Otis and Lexington streets. In the vicinity of Chadwick square it was called Danson’s Brook, because George Danson owned that tract and water rights as far as North Pond, or Indian Lake. The branch there is called Weasel Brook.
Danson’s brook is also Mill Brook-a historical stream in Worcester. The principal ford across it was at Lincoln Sq. There was the first important civic center; the beginning of early industry and trade.
There the first mills were built to utilize water power. Men fought for the rights to it.
At one time beavers built a dam across the lower stream near Front street, flooding the whole meadow that stretched between main street and Back street, now Summer street.
Millbrook street was laid out in March of 1748. The town voted to make the way “three rods wide commonly known and called ye New Road, land being left by ye proprietors for ye same beginning at ye corner of Lieut. John Fisk’s fence by his Sider mill… Until it extends to Danson’s Brook…until it extends to ye lane leading to the dwelling house of Stephen Sawing.”
Ye New Road now runs from West Boylston street east to Burncoat street.
The core of this article comes from A History of Your City Streets.
