Mt. Pleasant Schoolhouse

The Mt. Pleasant Schoolhouse, officially the District Number 6 Schoolhouse, was the one-room district school on Mt. Pleasant Street in North Billerica. It served the families on the east side of the Concord River above the Billerica Mills village, and by the late 1860s it was the largest district school in town. Two buildings served the district, both on the south side of the street on land of the Rogers family: the first, from 1791, near the middle of the street, and the second, from about 1840, near the corner of High Street. Neither lot was ever deeded to the town or the district, and after the district system ended the second lot went back into the Rogers farm.

Both school sites lay on the old Toothaker homestead, a farm of about 97 acres on the road from the mills toward Tewksbury that the Toothaker family (see Roger Toothaker House) had held since the seventeenth century. In 1782 Roger Toothaker sold 27 acres of it "with a Dwelling house & Barn standing thereon" to William Rogers, then 23, and in 1789 William's father Samuel Rogers left him by will "the whole of my Toothaker-farm, in Billerica." When the town met on September 12, 1791 to place a school-house in each squadron, its committee reported that the north ward house was to be set "in William Rogers' corner by John Rogers," sixteen feet square, at a cost of twenty pounds (Hazen, p. 256). John Rogers owned the farm at the corner of the Lowell road (High Street), now the site of the Thomas Rogers House; William Rogers's land ran west from it along the south side of the road to the canal and the mills. No deed of a school lot followed: the grantee indexes from 1620 to 1855 show no conveyance to District No. 6 or to the town on this road, and the schoolhouse stood on Rogers land by the family's leave.

William Rogers sold an undivided half of all his land to his son Calvin Rogers in 1828, and after William's death his other heirs quitclaimed the rest to Calvin in 1839: a homestead of 170 acres "bounded ... Northerly by said road leading from said corner to the 'Canal Mills'," that is, by Mt. Pleasant Street. Calvin Rogers, who married a daughter of Francis Faulkner, held both school sites for the next thirty years.

The first schoolhouse stood near the middle of the street, as shown on the Hales map of 1831, at what is now 2 Doris Avenue. By about 1840 it had been given up for a new building farther east, and in January 1848 Calvin Rogers sold the land around the old site, a two-acre lot fronting 20 rods on the road "about fifty rods Easterly from the bridge over the Boston and Lowell Rail Road," to Thomas Talbot, who married his daughter Mary Howe Rogers twelve days later. With 43 more acres bought from Rogers in 1858, it formed "the Thomas Talbot Homestead," where the future governor built his mansion. Talbot conveyed the homestead to his wife Isabella in 1879, and in 1920 her executor sold its eastern 11.57 acres to Jane A. McBride, who divided them into house lots on Doris Avenue and Frances Street (Plan Book 38, Plan 34). The first schoolhouse site, at the old line between the Talbot and Rogers land, became Lots 36 and 37, still bounded "by land now or formerly of one Rogers."

The second schoolhouse, in use from about 1840, stood near the High Street end of Mt. Pleasant Street, as shown on the 1853 town map, on a small lot at the edge of Calvin Rogers's land that the deeds call "the School House Lot." When Rogers sold the five acres at the corner of High Street to John E. Rowell in 1871, he began the description "at the Northwest corner at the road leading from North Billerica to Geo. P. Elliott's House, at land known as the School House Lot" and kept the school lot out of the sale. The next year Rowell sold the northwest corner of his land to the Baptist Society of North Billerica for a parsonage (now 47 Mt. Pleasant Street), again beginning "at land known as the School house lot." The school lot itself lay just west of the parsonage, on the street front.

Like Billerica's other district schools, No. 6 was taught in a summer term, usually by a young woman, and a winter term, when the older boys attended and a male teacher was sometimes hired. The Billerica School Committee examined each school at the close of every term, and its annual reports describe the teachers and the progress of their pupils. In 1853-54 the summer term was taught by Miss Louisa J. Rice and the winter term by Nathaniel H. Martin, a student at the Methodist Episcopal Biblical Institute in Concord, New Hampshire. The committee judged the school to be "among our first Schools in town" in scholarship and order. In 1861-62 Miss Abbie A. Batcheller of Boston taught three terms of about eleven weeks each, and the committee wrote that under her the school had been changing "from glory to glory." In 1867-68 Miss Susan Salter taught the summer sessions and Miss Carrie Hartford the winter session, whose closing examination on January 31 drew some thirty visitors. Hartford returned for a 21-week summer term in 1868 and was praised for improving the classification of the school. The winter term that followed, taught by Miss Kate McMahon of Lowell, was judged a failure for want of order.

North Billerica's population grew quickly in the 1860s with the expansion of the mills, and the school grew with it. In 1867-68 it enrolled 60 pupils in summer and 41 in winter, drawn from 61 children of school age in the district. The following year it enrolled 55 in summer and 56 in winter. By 1869-70 it had 51 pupils in summer, 56 in autumn and 61 in winter, making it the largest school in Billerica.

* Wages in 1853-54 were reported including board. No district census was taken after the districts were abolished in 1869. The 1870-71 report refers to an appended table that is missing from the surviving copy.

In 1868-69 Billerica voted to abolish its school districts and take direct charge of all schools. The School Committee recommended that the schools of Districts No. 4 and No. 6 be united in one building "large enough for the purpose, and suitable for graded schools, located somewhere in the village of North Billerica." The new building was delayed, and in 1869-70 Carrie Hartford taught the crowded No. 6 school for all 31 weeks of the year, with Miss F. Hemphill hired as an assistant for half of each day; the committee called it "a hard school," but credited Hartford with "untiring efforts." It then proposed to keep one of the two old North Billerica schoolhouses for primary pupils, "moving it to some desirable spot in the village," and to sell the other. When the new school building opened in the autumn of 1870, a mixed school continued for a time "in the house before used by school No. 6" under Miss Thirza A. Jaquith, while the grammar and primary pupils went to the new building, the forerunner of the Old Talbot School.

The town never held a deed to the school lot, and once the building was given up the land was simply Calvin Rogers's again. In October 1876 he sold Joseph D. Gould, manager of the Talbot chemical works and husband of his daughter Elvira, a house lot running 180 feet west along the street from the Baptist parsonage, which took in the old School House Lot without naming it. The Joseph D. Gould House built there (43 Mt. Pleasant Street) has an attached shed that local tradition holds "may have been part of school" (MACRIS BIL.290). After a straw conveyance through Charles H. Kohlrausch in 1884, the property stood in Elvira R. Gould's name until her death; her residuary legatees, the New England Home for Little Wanderers and three other charities, sold it in 1934 to Miles J. and Anna M. Finnegan, and the executor of Miles J. Finnegan sold it in 1974 to private owners. Both school sites are now private house lots, at 2 Doris Avenue and 43 Mt. Pleasant Street. The building's later history is not recorded; in 1887 the town received ten dollars from C. H. Kohlrausch for an "old school house shed," perhaps the last of it.

References

1. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), p. 256: the 1791 report placing the north ward school-house "in William Rogers' corner by John Rogers".

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Recorded is Book/Page at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds unless noted; Probate # is a Middlesex probate case, Ctf a Land Court certificate of title.