Municipal Buildings Closed June 19, 2023

Municipal Buildings in West Boylston will be closed on Monday, June 19, 2023 in recognition of Juneteenth.  Juneteenth, is an annual commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States after the Civil War.  Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021.  

On June 19, 1865, about two months after the Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Va., Gordon Granger, a Union general, arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform enslaved African Americans of their freedom and that the Civil War had ended. General Granger’s announcement put into effect the Emancipation Proclamation, which had been issued nearly two and a half years earlier, on Jan. 1, 1863, by President Abraham Lincoln.