Water body

Merrimack River

The Merrimack River does not touch Billerica today, but it was the northern boundary of the town as first granted, and both of Billerica's rivers end in it. The Merrimack is formed in New Hampshire and flows south into Massachusetts, turning east at Lowell over Pawtucket Falls and reaching the sea at Newburyport. The Concord River joins it at Lowell and the Shawsheen River at Lawrence; as John Farmer wrote in 1816, the town "is watered by Concord and Shawshin rivers, which run northeastwardly into Merrimac river."

When the General Court granted Shawshin to Cambridge in June 1642, the grant covered "all the land lying upon Shaweshin Ryver, & between that & Concord Ryver, & between that & Merrimack Ryver." Henry A. Hazen traced the bounds of the town that grew from it: Shawshin "was bounded on the southwest by Concord, southeast by Cambridge and Woburn, north by Andover and the Merrimack River, and west by Concord River." From the Shawshin to the Merrimack the Andover line ran straight for about five miles; "thence, the line of Billerica followed the Merrimack and the Concord Rivers, until it reached the Pawtucket stake again, a distance not far from three miles on each river." This Merrimack shore, from the mouth of the Concord east toward Andover, lay in what is now Lowell and Tewksbury. Billerica's ties to the river reached farther upstream as well: in 1656 the General Court granted the town eight thousand acres at Naticott on the Merrimack, in what became southern New Hampshire, which the town let John Parker sell in 1658 to buy up the Cambridge titles within its own bounds.

The angle between the Concord and the Merrimack was Wamesit, "around Fort Hill and the modern 'Belvidere' of Lowell," the home of the Pawtucket people, who fished at the falls and planted the ground at the mouth of the Concord. Much of the land between the rivers had been granted in 1640 and 1641 to Margaret Winthrop, wife of the governor, as a farm of three thousand acres, laid out by Jonathan Danforth "in a true circle." In April 1664 Danforth surveyed five hundred acres of it for the Indians of Wamesit, "on the east side of Concord Riuer and joyning to the sajd riuer & to Merremack Riuer," running from the mouth of the Concord down the Merrimack 250 poles. John Eliot preached there, and in 1674 Daniel Gookin counted fifteen families, about seventy-five people, in the praying town. The Wamesit people stayed neutral in King Philip's War, which Hazen thought may have saved Billerica, though they suffered badly at English hands. The settlers' garrison nearest the river was that of Samuel Hunt, half a mile south of the Merrimack at Hunt's Falls, and in 1703 the Chelmsford soldiers kept watch "at the wading place at Wamesit." On December 2, 1687 the sachem Wannalancet and others sold Jonathan Tyng the old planting ground, "bounded by Merrimac river four score pole" and taking in most of Fort Hill.

The old Billerica shore of the Merrimack was lost in two steps. In 1725 Jonathan Bowers, Samuel Hunt and others asked to be made a separate town of the Wamesit lands and the Winthrop farm, and on June 13, 1726 the General Court annexed them to Chelmsford instead. The rest of the northern part of the town, toward the Merrimack, was set off as Tewksbury on December 23, 1734. Since then Billerica has had no frontage on the river.

The river remained important to the town through the Middlesex Canal, which was built to carry the trade of the Merrimack valley and New Hampshire to Boston. At Billerica Mills, Hazen wrote, "the Concord River is one hundred and nine feet above tide-water in Boston Harbor and twenty-five feet above the Merrimack, which the canal reached at its most southerly bend, about a mile above Pawtucket Falls." Boats coming down the Merrimack locked up into the canal at Middlesex Village in Chelmsford, now Lowell, and ran south to the summit level at the Billerica mill pond; after 1837 the Red Lock at North Billerica let rafts from the Concord River go north to the Merrimack and on to Newburyport. In 1839 Henry D. Thoreau and his brother John went this way on the trip described in "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," and "by noon we were let down into the Merrimack through the locks at Middlesex, just above Pawtucket Falls."

In the twentieth century the Merrimack came back into town planning as a possible water supply. The town's engineers found that the Concord River could not always furnish what the water plant could treat, and the Dolly Brook Reservoir committee of 1974 studied supplementing the river at low flow with "water from the Merrimack River." In 1978, after a storage reservoir on the Concord was given up, the public works department advised that the town "now consider the second solution which would take water from the Merrimack River." The plan was not carried out, and Billerica still draws its water from the Concord.

Merrimack River

Merrimack River

References