Great Depression

Type	Industry
Date	October 29, 1929 to December 7, 1941

The Great Depression reached Billerica slowly and stayed late. In 1929 the town spent about $7,500 a year on outside relief, the general aid its Board of Public Welfare gave to families in need. In its report for 1930 the board wrote that it had "had to contend with considerable unemployment during the year," and late that year, at the request of Governor Frank G. Allen, the selectmen named a Committee on Unemployment under Harry Dunlap Brown, with A. Warren Stearns, Joseph F. Talbot and others. Registration at the Town Hall turned up ninety-two unemployed residents by January 1931 and 220 men and women by the end of that year. The welfare board's report for 1931 described the people coming to it: "The majority of the unemployed, victims of social conditions, reserves gone, are now without work or wages, through no fault of their own. They do not want charity, they want a chance to earn the necessities of life." The Kitchener Farm gave hundreds of quarts of milk for families with children. Richard J. Conway, chairman of the welfare board for over thirty years, died that August; William J. Morris, Lillian W. Schmidt and Richard F. Conway carried on, Richard F. Conway as chairman from 1935 through 1942.

Relief costs climbed from $10,712 in 1931 to $24,250 in 1932 and $32,404 in 1933, against an appropriation of $20,000. Much of the money went to families who lived in Billerica but had their legal settlement elsewhere: in 1932 about $10,000 was due back to the town from Boston, Cambridge, Medford, Somerville, Lowell and other places. Old Age Assistance, a new state program in force from July 1, 1931, began with twenty-five cases; after the qualifying age was lowered to sixty-five in September 1936 the town had 110 cases by the end of that year and 172 a year later, and its cost rose to $44,118 by 1942, much of it repaid by federal grants.

The town tried first to make relief into work. A special town meeting on May 8, 1933 voted unanimously that the welfare board should "require all physically able welfare aid recipients to render service to the Town," at the highway department's daily wage, clearing brush, building sidewalks, culverts and drains, planting trees and "digging water holes and making wood roads available for fire apparatus." The pumping station was rebuilt and a new public works garage built with welfare labor. Town employees gave back ten percent of their pay that year, $5,907 in all, and school employees $3,145, to pay for work for the unemployed. The public works department shared its jobs among 383 men in 1933, and in 1934 made 708 changes of employment among 228 men so that more families would have some wages.

Federal programs took over from the end of 1933. Under the Civil Works Administration men creosoted gypsy moth nests and laid water mains on Boston Road and Summit Road. Under the Emergency Relief Administration in 1934 and 1935 they extended Fox Hill Cemetery, dug fire water holes in East Billerica, began the athletic field at Howe High School, repaired the town infirmary, rebuilt about ten roads and opened wood roads in the Jones Town Forest. The welfare board said that without this work the relief rolls "would have undoubtedly reached 200"; instead it ended 1934 with sixty-one cases. The changeover to the Works Progress Administration in 1935 went badly at first: "Before this change was completed the majority of workers did considerable loafing. When work was resumed they had to wait weeks before they received any compensation." From 1936 to 1942 the WPA was the town's largest employer of last resort. In 1937 it employed 185 Billerica workers and spent $114,496 of federal money against $23,737 from the town; in 1938 the federal share reached $186,811. Its projects included painting and repairing the Billerica Town Hall (1895) and Union Hall, the Howe athletic field, a detailed map of the town, sidewalks and miles of water mains, among them 8,800 feet on the Middlesex Turnpike, and a sewing room that made clothing for the district commissary until it closed on June 19, 1941. After the hurricane of September 21, 1938, every project except the water mains was stopped and about 600 WPA men, from Billerica, Lowell, Stoneham, Medford and Cambridge, cleared 668 acres of fallen timber and eighty miles of wood roads and fire lanes at no cost to the town. The welfare board certified men for the WPA, picked young men for the Civilian Conservation Corps (no CCC camp was in Billerica), handled federal surplus food, and from 1936 sponsored the sewing unit; the National Youth Administration worked on the town's parks, including Kohlrausch Park, in 1939 and 1940.

The town's finances went the wrong way at the same time. The assessed valuation peaked at $9,756,645 in 1931 and fell to $8,212,589 in 1937; the assessors blamed the 1936 loss partly on the demolition of the Consolidated Rendering Plant and "the loss of machinery at the Boston & Maine Car Shops." Land held by the town for unpaid taxes grew from about $31,700 in 1929 to $86,683 in 1936. For the first time in many years the town carried tax anticipation notes over from one year to the next, $25,000 in 1932, $50,000 in 1933 and $105,000 in 1934, and the selectmen under Maurice A. Buck reported that the town's credit was so impaired that money could be borrowed "only ... at exorbitant rates of interest." The tax rate rose from $28 per thousand in 1929 and 1930 to $36 in 1933 and $42 in 1939, the highest in the town's history. Instead of borrowing more, the town paid its debt down, from $291,000 in 1930 to $14,000 in 1942. No bank failure touched the town's money, which was kept in the Billerica Trust Company and the Union Old Lowell National Bank.

The schools grew through the whole decade. The school committee had expected fewer pupils in 1931 because of "the depression and the reports of families moving away," but enrollment rose instead, from 1,300 in 1929 to 1,491 in 1932, "the largest increase recorded in any year," and to 1,733 in 1938, partly because older pupils stayed in high school when there was no work for them. Superintendent Eugene C. Vining wrote in 1932 that "in times of economic depression it is always youth that suffers longest and most severely." The school budget was held at $118,000 from 1934 to 1936; teachers' yearly raises were withheld for three or four years, so that some were "working the third and fourth year at the beginner's minimum salary," though the committee could say in 1935 that there had been "no salary reductions." By 1938 more than fourteen hundred pupils ate their noon lunch at school, where hot lunches, cocoa or soup were available.

The town's industries shrank more quietly. Passenger car repairs at the Boston and Maine shops in North Billerica, opened in 1913 (see Opening of the Boston and Maine Shops), were moved to Concord, New Hampshire in 1931, and the shop whistle, the North Billerica fire alarm since 1915, was taken down in 1934. The Talbot Mills sold off its company houses in 1936 and 1937. By 1938 the welfare board could report that "the industrial business in town is again in full swing," but it added that "there is still a great unemployment condition existing," and 1938 was the most expensive year for outside relief of the whole decade, $39,325.

Billerica's population grew by about a third in the 1930s, from 5,876 in 1930 to 6,650 in the state census of 1935 and 7,933 in 1940, while the number of buildings the assessors counted rose by only about 340. Much of the new population moved into the summer camps and cottages that had been built since about 1900 around Nuttings Lake and along the Concord and Shawsheen rivers; in 1927 the assessors had counted about 2,634 dwellings including camps, against only about 1,150 houses the year before. Families who could not afford city rents could live in a camp for little: in 1940 the welfare board traced a rise in Old Age Assistance cases moving into town to "so many cottages throughout the town which are available for rent at $10.00 to $15.00 per month," and the Planning Board complained of "the small lot and 'shack' problem" and of buildings "too cheap to justify adequate assessment." At Nuttings Lake Park a committee under Victor J. Hosmer counted "about 51 permanent residents" early in 1933; the town arranged emergency water supplies there in 1935 and 1936 and laid WPA water mains in 1940 to 1942, and the number of householders in the directories rose from about 29 in 1930-31 to 89 in 1940-41. At River Pines, laid out in 1927 and 1928 as a summer colony, householders went from about eight to seventy-five in the same years, most of them tenants. The schools saw it too: in 1937 West Billerica, Nuttings Lake and Pinehurst had the largest increases in pupils, and an extra bus had to be added for "the Pinehurst and Lake sections."

The change was real, but it was not complete. In 1941 the town still called Nuttings Lake, Riverhurst, Queensland and Rio Vista its "camping sections," and the fire department kept a truck for "Brush and Summer Cottage fires" through 1938. Riverhurst and Ranlett Grove had only a handful of year-round households until the 1950s, and the cottage colony at Greenwood's Grove on Dudley Road shrank rather than grew, its "cottage business" ebbing in the Depression years. As late as 1945 the school committee noted that until then "our large September enrollment has been much reduced by Thanksgiving" as summer families went back to the cities. The full conversion of the colonies into year-round neighborhoods came after World War II, in the housing shortage that left families in 1947 "living in unfinished camps with poor sanitary conditions," when the town took thirteen Nuttings Lake streets in 1946, laid water mains there in 1947 and 1948, and made the lake its own voting precinct in 1949.

Defense work ended the Depression in Billerica before the war itself did. The welfare board reported in 1941 "a decided decrease in employable relief cases," with costs lower than in any of the past ten years, "brought about by the increased demand for man power in defense industry." The WPA's last projects in town, under Frank A. Kelley as chairman of the selectmen and Earle B. Boss as sponsor's agent, were war salvage of old car rails and an iron bridge and work at Fort Devens, and in 1942 the welfare board's request for the coming year was "back to about the appropriation of 1931, this being the year when the employment situation started to become acute."

People

Richard J. Conway: Chairman of the Board of Public Welfare for over thirty years until his death on August 17, 1931.
Richard F. Conway: Board of Public Welfare from 1931, chairman 1935-1942, through the WPA years.
William J. Morris: Board of Public Welfare throughout the Depression; chairman in 1931.
Harry D. Brown: Chairman of the Committee on Unemployment formed in 1930 at the Governor's request; welfare board in 1929.
William H. Butterfield: Chairman of the Board of Public Welfare in 1933 and 1934, the years of CWA and ERA work.
Guy G. Wilson: Board of Public Welfare from 1937.
Lillian W. Schmidt: Board of Public Welfare 1931-1932.
Albert W. Stearns: Committee on Unemployment 1930-1931; selectman in 1934.
Joseph F. Talbot: Committee on Unemployment 1930-1931.
Maurice A. Buck: Chairman of the selectmen whose 1934 report described the town's impaired credit and tax anticipation borrowing.
Frank A. Kelley: Chairman of the selectmen who signed the WPA statements of 1938-1942.
Earle B. Boss: WPA sponsor's agent for the town in 1942.
Eugene C. Vining: Superintendent of schools through the Depression; "it is always youth that suffers longest and most severely" (1932).
Victor J. Hosmer: Chairman of the 1932-1933 committee on an all-year water service at Nuttings Lake, which counted about 51 permanent residents.
Frederick T. O'Hara: Water superintendent during the Nuttings Lake water emergency of 1935-1936.

Great Depression

Great Depression

People

References