Hidden away in the woods behind the Bolton Town Hall, this small brick structure sits atop a rocky outcropping and showcases a piece of early history we often do not think about. Built in 1812 as a powder house, a storage facility far from homes and businesses to store the town’s supply of gunpowder, musketballs and cannonballs, the structure remains as the town’s oldest extant municipal building. Since the founding of the colonies, the procurement and storage of ammunition had been the responsibility of local governments. Before this structure was built in the forest, Bolton‘s gunpowder and ammunition had been kept under the meetinghouse pulpit, not the best place suitable for highly explosive storage. The structure is a well-preserved example of a typical early 19th-century powder house, built of brick manufactured in town, laid in common bond, measuring just over seven-feet square with a pyramidal wood shingle roof.