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Community Corner

Travel Back to the 1850s Sunday with Historical Society

Tickets still available for trolley tour.

A famous inventor who shares his name with a local elementary school, a priest assigned to the first Catholic Church in Woburn and a Civil War solider, all from another century, will make an appearance in the city this coming Sunday, to people who take a ride back into the city’s history.

The will hold its third annual "trolley tour" Sunday, Sept. 18.

Tour-goers will meet Charles Goodyear, who discovered a way to make rubber useable, at the They will also meet Rev. John Quealy of and Civil War Private Sheehan at their respective gravesites at Calvary Cemetery.

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They will also see the innards of the old pumping station at and view Civil War artifacts from the collection.  

Historical Society program director Kathy Lucero chose the sites, with a common theme, she told Woburn Patch Monday:  the mid-1800s, when, she said, Irish immigrants and the Catholic church moved into the city. Around the same time, Goodyear discovered a process – vulcanization – that  kept rubber solid and flexible, instead of melting in hot weather and becoming rigid when it was cold. He lived on Montvale Avenue, Lucero said, between Washington Street and Central Street.

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For the first time this year, the library will participate in the tour, Lucero said, with its Civil War exhibit. The tours usually start and finish outside the library, Lucero explained, because there’s enough room there to line up the four trolley-style vehicles that carry passengers to the tour sites. The tour stops change every year, Lucero said.

Lucero did the research on the sites and wrote “scripts” for the re-enactors.  Focusing on the mid-1800s came to her, she said, after she worked on a project to mark graves of World War I veterans at Calvary Cemetery. .

Tours will leave the library at 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. They last about two hours:  roughly 20 minutes at each site, plus travel time.

Tickets are still available, Lucero said Monday afternoon. They are $10 per person for dues-paying Woburn Historical Society members, $15 per person for non-members.

The order form is posted on the society’s website, woburnhistoricalsociety.com. The society must receive your ticket order, with payment, by this coming Friday, Sept. 16, not, as the website states, Sept. 13, Lucero said. Send the form and payment to the society at PO Box 91, Woburn, 1801. Pick up those tickets Sunday at the library before your tour. Come 20 to 30 minutes before your tour is scheduled to leave to pick them up, Lucero said.

With tour-goers headed to Horn Pond for one tour stop, Lucero said she tried to hire the so-called Duck Boats, vehicles that take riders on both streets and the Charles River in Boston. No dice.  They are regulated by the Coast Guard, she said, and the regulations were too difficult to conquer. “I was heartbroken,” she said.

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