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Massachusetts Route 117

highway in Massachusetts

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 20, 2026
Entity authorityQ2484119
Source-derived summary

Route 117 is a 31.0718-mile-long (50.0052 km) east–west state highway in Massachusetts, running from Route 12 in Leominster in northeast Worcester County to U.S. Route 20 (US 20) in Waltham in central Middlesex County.

Route description

Route 117 begins in the city of Leominster, near the city center, and passes southeast along New Lancaster Road before having an interchange with Interstate 190's Exit 17, just over the city line into Lancaster. In Lancaster the route heads eastward, crossing two branches of the Nashua River while having a short, quarter-mile concurrency with Route 70 south of Fort Devens. The route then crosses into Bolton, crossing Route 110 near the Bolton Flats State Wildlife Management Area. It then passes through the center of town before crossing I-495 at Exit 27. It serves as the northern terminus of Route 85 before crossing into Middlesex County and the town of Stow.

In Stow, the route passes through the countryside before meeting Route 62 at the center of town. The two routes head eastward concurrently, entering into Maynard. The routes split just after crossing the Assabet River, with Route 117 heading in a more southeastern direction. The route crosses Route 27 before entering Sudbury.

Editorial summary

“Massachusetts Route 117” enters the record as highway in Massachusetts. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Massachusetts, Route and highway can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current 199-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Massachusetts, Route and highway.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Massachusetts Route 117” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Massachusetts, Route and highway provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2484119. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Massachusetts Route 117”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Massachusetts Route 117 primary sources, Massachusetts Route 117 archive and Massachusetts research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Massachusetts Route 117”?
  2. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
  3. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Massachusetts Route 117” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.