James Stott House

The James Stott House at 20 Mount Pleasant Street in North Billerica is a side-hall house with Victorian trim. Its main block was probably built around 1865, and behind it is a much smaller and older house that now serves as its ell. Charles H. Kohlrausch Jr.'s memoir says this small house "was built in 1814 by two young men by the name of Hosmer, who worked on it mostly evenings after completing their work elsewhere". For a century the property belonged to the Talbots' mills and was known as "the Wilson Lot".

The deeds show how the small house began. On Nov. 20, 1815 Thomas Richardson, gentleman, sold Jeremiah Hosmer, a clothier, and Harmon A. Hosmer, a laborer, "a certain piece of upland ... containing half an acre" for $40. The lot lay on "the road leading from John Rogers to the Canal mills" (now Mount Pleasant Street), with John Rogers's land on the east, and the brothers promised "to make and always maintain a good fence". No building is mentioned. By Nov. 25, 1822, when Jeremiah (by then of Acton) and Harman (a Boston tavern keeper) sold it to Jonathan Wilson, a miller, for $200, it was "a dwelling house and one half acre of land ... between John Rogers house and the house of Francis Faulkner Esqr." So the Hosmers built the house between about 1815 and 1822, a little later than the date in Kohlrausch's memoir.

The house then passed through several workingmen's hands. Jonathan Wilson sold it in 1832 to Josiah Blodget, a stone-layer, for $356, describing it as "near the Rail Road and also near the North School house called No. 6" (the Mt. Pleasant Schoolhouse). Blodget, by then living in Merrimack, N.H., sold it in February 1841 to John Mixer. Four days later Mixer sold it to Jeremiah Hood, a cooper, who mortgaged it to Daniel Wilson. In 1847 Hood sold the house to Daniel Wilson for $259. On Apr. 30, 1850 Daniel Wilson sold the lot for $400 to Charles P. Talbot of Lowell and Thomas Talbot, partners as C. P. Talbot and Co., who had taken over the dye and chemical works at the falls.

Under the Talbots the "Wilson Lot" was housing for the men who ran their works. Kohlrausch remembered it as the house of Alexander Cochrane Sr., manager of the Talbot Chemical Works, and later of James Stott, the name shown here on the 1875 map, who is believed to have been an early superintendent of the Talbot Mills. The larger front house was probably added in the 1860s, when Mount Pleasant Street ("Nobility Hill") was being built up with houses for the mill families. The Talbot heirs conveyed their North Billerica property to the Talbot Mills in 1884, and a mill vote of 1915 still called the house "the so-called Stott House".

On July 28, 1916 the Talbot Mills sold the house and its 23,621 square foot lot, "known as the 'Wilson Lot'", to James F. and Martha B. Delmege. Delmege had bought the vacant mill lot next door the year before and was for many years station agent at the North Billerica depot. In 1936 the mill gave them a drain right through to Billerica Avenue when it divided its land there into house lots. After James Delmege's death his widow sold the house in 1941 to Charles B. and Edna C. Dawson. After Charles died, their children released the house to Edna in 1948. In 1952, as Edna C. Roxbee, she sold it, and the lot was then divided, leaving the house on a parcel of 11,962 square feet with 75 feet on Mount Pleasant Street. Private owners have held it since. In 1981 it was a two-family house with asbestos siding over the clapboards.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.285

Deed References Expand all

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