Samuel Hill House

The Samuel Hill House stands well back from Concord Road in the south part of town, near the Middlesex Turnpike, on the line of an older, abandoned stretch of the road. When the Historical Commission surveyed it in 1973 its recorder called it "unusually well preserved," with "innumerable interior features" consistent with a date about 1700, and summed it up: "THIS ONE IS A GEM."

The land was part of the farm of Jonathan Hill, son of the settler Ralph Hill. On March 27, 1717 Jonathan, "shewing a fatherly Care," gave his son Samuel Hill several lots, first among them twenty acres of upland and meadow bounded south by his brother Jonathan Hill Jr., running southwest to the Concord River and "Northeast to ye Country Road." Samuel, known as Samuel Hill Jr. to set him apart from his cousin Capt. Samuel Hill, had married Sarah Page in 1698-9, and the house was probably begun then on land his father still owned. In 1746 he gave his son Samuel Hill 3rd an acre and a quarter at the corner by the road, next to Abraham Jaquith, with half of his barn and a line "by the Northeasterly side of my well," and the son built there; when he died early in 1749 his estate included "the House lot one acre & quarter with the Buildings."

Samuel Hill Jr. made his will in 1750 and died in 1762, leaving his real estate to his five daughters and to his granddaughter Abiel, the daughter of Samuel 3rd, who had married Samuel Kidder. The division of May 3, 1762 split the homestead of thirty-one acres "with a mansion House and a Barn thereon" in three, and Abiel received "Nine acres and forty two poles of Land with the mansion house and Barn thereon." The same day her aunt Sarah Baldwin and her husband sold Kidder their eleven acres, "the southwesterly part of the Homestead that was our Father's Mr Samuel Hill," and in 1790 Jesse French sold him the last twelve acres by Jaquith's line, so that the old homestead was whole again. For thirty years it was the Samuel Kidder place. On December 15, 1791 Samuel and Abihail Kidder sold the thirty-three acres, between Joseph Jaquith, the river, Peter Hill and the road to Bedford, "with all the Buildings thereon standing," to John Kidder for 400 pounds. The deeds do not say whether the house that survives is the 1762 "mansion house" or the house of Samuel Hill 3rd; both stood on the thirty-three acres.

The Hills came back by purchase. In 1805 John Kidder sold the farm, "about a mile from the meeting house on the road leading to Concord," to his neighbor to the south, Peter Hill, for $3,250, and in 1808 Peter sold it for the same price to Joseph Hill, son of his wife Lucy (Fitch) by her first husband Joseph Hill Jr. The family story repeated in the 1973 survey, that Joseph Hill Jr. and Lucy Fitch took over the house at their marriage in 1782, does not fit the records: the Kidders owned it until 1791, and Joseph Hill Jr.'s 1789 estate lists other farms. A window pane engraved "J.H./L.F.," which the Stearns family kept, may come from Lucy's years with her son. Joseph Hill died in 1810 leaving a widow, Dorcas, and an infant son, and the appraisers valued "The dwelling house, barn, out buildings and farm, containing about thirty two acres, where the deceased lived" at $2,700. In 1811 Dorcas was given her dower in nearly the whole homestead, "with a dwelling house, barn, corn-house, wood-house & cyder-mill house thereon standing," bounded by Peter Hill, the river, Joseph Jaquith and the new Middlesex Turnpike. In 1818 she married Henry Bridge, who became guardian of her son, and the place became the Bridge farm, though Bridge never owned it; he died in 1826 and his own estate did not include it.

The son, Dr. Joseph F. Hill, a physician, left everything to his wife Caroline by a will proved in December 1849. Caroline, then living in Hallowell, Maine, sold "the Bridge farm so called containing forty acres more or less with the buildings thereon" to Benjamin J. Gilbert on October 30, 1851 for $2,825, taking back a mortgage for most of the price. On April 17, 1865 Gilbert sold "my farm known as my Bridge Farm" to Thomas McElligott for $2,175. In 1884 McElligott granted the Boston and Lowell Railroad a right of way two rods wide across the farm for the standard-gauge Bedford and Billerica branch, to revert to him if the railroad was ever given up. The McElligott family worked the farm for more than eighty years; none of the four children married, and the last, Mary J. McElligott, died at 92. In May 1948 her executor sold the Bridge Farm for $13,000 to Salvatore Vasta Jr., who deeded it the same day to the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts of the Independent Order Sons of Italy.

The lodge sold the farm in 1957 to Imperial Development Corp. of Lynn, after the Commonwealth had taken about 1.83 acres of it, and in 1959 the developer set off the old house on Lot A, 2.21 acres bounded on the east by "the center line of the former Concord Road, now abandoned," and sold it to a couple from Carlisle who restored it. It has been privately owned since, and in 1973 still had its barn on a lot of about two and a half acres.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.171
2. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), Genealogical Register: the Hill, Kidder and Bridge families

Title References Expand all

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.