Jasper F. Bruce

Jasper F. Bruce (born 1845) was a grocer and trader who for more than forty years kept a store and home on the east side of the Town Common in Billerica Centre, in the building now known as the James Abbott House at 432 Boston Road. He was born in Stoneham on February 15, 1845, the son of Frank Bruce, whom Hazen describes as a grandson of the Rev. John Bruce, a Dartmouth graduate of 1781 and the first pastor of Mont Vernon, New Hampshire, from 1785 to 1809. On December 1, 1870 he married Cordelia Ripley of Maine. Their daughters were Nellie R. (1872), Annie E. (1874) and Edna F. (1877).

He was in business in Billerica by 1876. That August, described as a trader, he paid $750 to Mary Cole, the wife of the blacksmith Samuel Cole, for the small lot nearly opposite the First Parish meeting house "with the buildings thereon, heretofore used as a Town House", the old Town House. The building burned in the fire of October 1877 that also destroyed the hotel next door, and on October 16 he sold the empty lot for $300 to Joseph W. Green, who added it to the hotel land.

The will of Samuel W. Baldwin, probated on March 15, 1881, left him the property next door to the south, "a dwelling-house & store connected and a barn" on about an acre, which had been the home and store of the Baldwin family since Henry Baldwin and his brother bought it in 1818. Hazen wrote in 1883 that Bruce "has been for some years a merchant; his store, east of the common". The town reports of the 1880s and 1890s record him supplying groceries, flour, grain, kerosene, nails and scythes to the town and to families on poor relief. He was one of the town's measurers of wood and lumber from 1894 to 1897, and around 1900 the town paid him for the street lights, the care of the Common and the town pump beside it. He was treasurer of the First Orthodox Congregational Church, now the First Congregational Church of Billerica, in the early 1900s, and in 1900 the church society lent him $700 on his property.

In 1896 he leased "the store in the northerly side of my dwelling house" to Fred H. Parker, "on the condition that no intoxicating liquors are to be sold on the premises". In 1914 he leased the grocery and provision store, with the barn, sheds and storehouses, to Harry G. Watts for ten years from 1912, keeping a clothes yard behind his house; the lot also held a barber shop and the post office of T. F. Lyons, the T.F. Lyons Post Office. A fire from an oil stove damaged the store, occupied by H. G. Watts & Co., in January 1918. In 1922 the town voted to repay Mrs. Jasper Bruce half the cost of a cement sidewalk in front of her property on Boston Road.

He died late of West Windham, New Hampshire. Under a probate decree of November 24, 1925 his trustee, Harry W. Conant of Boston, sold the house lot, 34,325 square feet as shown on a plan of land "belonging to Cordelia Bruce", to Dr. A. Warren Stearns for $8,500 on December 1, 1925.

References

1. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), Genealogical Register p. 21, BRUCE

Deed References Expand all

Recorded is Book/Page at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds unless noted.