Person

William H. Odiorne

Select Board
In Office	1847 - 1848 1852 - 1854
Howe School Trustee
In Office	1852 - 1877

William H. Odiorne was a farmer in the south part of Billerica in the 1840s and 1850s, a selectman, and the executor of the will of Dr. Zadok Howe, whose bequest founded the Howe School; he was one of the school's seven original trustees and served on the board for twenty-five years. Nothing has been found of his birth, parents or family. A William H. Odiorne witnessed a mortgage given by the Centre trader William Richardson in April 1819, but when he bought his Billerica farm in November 1843 he was described as "of Cambridge."

That farm, bought from Orrin and Nancy W. Fairbank for $5,000, was the old Blanchard homestead on the Lexington Road north of Nutting's Pond, 132 acres in three parcels "with a Dwelling House, two Barns and other Buildings," and the deed passed to him the nursery trees, plants and shrubbery then growing on it. The place was later the Noyes farm and then the Kitchener Farm, and Hazen still called it "the Odiorne place" in 1883. He sold it in September 1854 to the Robinson family, taking back a mortgage. In November 1855 the town named a committee to obtain for the town "the Fox Hill or Odiorne lot for a new cemetery."

He was elected a selectman in 1847 and again in 1852 and 1853. When Dr. Howe died in March 1851, Odiorne, as his executor, carried out a will that left the bulk of his estate to a board of trustees to be incorporated for a school on a lot Howe had chosen and bought himself. Odiorne was named a trustee with John Baldwin, James R. Faulkner, Dudley Foster, Marshall Preston, Amos Spaulding and George H. Whitman, and the board was incorporated on February 27, 1852. He sat with Whitman and Faulkner on the building committee for the two-story brick school on Boston Road, designed by Daniel G. Bean of Lowell; work began on June 17, 1851, and the school was dedicated on May 31, 1852, with prayers, addresses and the reading of Dr. Howe's will, opening with 52 pupils. Among the pupils of the first year was a Frederick Odiorne, who later served as a lieutenant in the United States Army, and a Eugene F. Odiorne entered in 1857.

In 1853 and 1854 Odiorne, then described as a Billerica yeoman, administered the estate of Levi T. Foster, a factory overseer who had died intestate leaving a widow and two small children; he obtained a license to sell the 34-acre homestead, sold the old John Foster farm on the road to Lowell at auction in March 1854 for $2,724.24, and settled his account in 1858 with the widow's thirds paid. He remained a trustee of the Howe School until 1877, and the school's catalogue of 1897 lists him among its deceased trustees.

William H. Odiorne

William H. Odiorne

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