Saugus Town Hall

Saugus Town Hall is a beautifully restored Stick Style building, in original colors and with exceptional surviving decoration that reflects the aspirations of a community whose principal claim to fame has rested on the colonial-era iron foundry. The partnership of George Lord and George Fuller, based primarily in Salem, also designed town halls for Marblehead and Topsfield. The architects planned the first floor for town offices and a meeting hall on the second. In the rear wing they placed the high school and library. The central pavilion, capped by a decorative cornice and banded slate roof, includes a clock tower, which, in turn, has its own ornate cupola with a cornice and slate roof. A similar cupola is on the roof of the high school wing, which also has its own entrance portico.

The first Saugus Town Hall also survives nearby at 44 Taylor Street. President Andrew Jackson dedicated this large Greek Revival–style building in 1838, appropriately as the $2,000 cost of the structure came from the refunded Treasury surplus of the Jackson administration. Two large fluted Doric columns in antis flank the entrance to the building and support a pedimented gable end. Now the local post of the American Legion, the building was moved down the street to this site in about 1875 to make way for the new town hall.