South Billerica

South Billerica is the southern part of Billerica, along the old road to Bedford (now Concord Road) between the Concord River and Nashua Road, south of the Centre to the Bedford line. Its old center was Hill's Mills, where Mill Brook, the outlet of Nuttings Lake, crosses Concord Road at Hill's Millpond. A deed of 1853 calls the place "the Southerly part of said Billerica called Hills Mills."

Nearly all of it was the 1,500-acre farm granted to Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley, which Hazen described as "beginning at the Two Brothers, on Concord River," and running down the river two and a half miles. Dudley sold it in 1652 to three men of Woburn, and in 1657 Ralph Hill bought one of their shares. The Hill family farmed along the Bedford road for generations: the Jonathan Hill House beside the mill pond is one of the oldest houses in town, and the Job Hill House stood on Dudley Road until it burned in 1925. The Stearns family settled on Mill Brook nearer the river, where the Captain John Stearns House is dated by tradition to 1689. The rocks at the farm's south end became the line between Billerica and Bedford when Bedford was incorporated in 1729.

Hill's Mills began as the Hill family's grist mill, first named in a will of 1795. From soon after 1830 Jonathan Hill made there the leather-splitting machine patented by Samuel Parker, and in 1853 he sold the business to Charles H. Hill, who carried it on for many years. Across the road was the Hill Blacksmith Shop, and farther north the Samuel Cole Blacksmith Shop. The Jaquith brothers started the Jaquith Glue Factory in 1867 near the old bridge of the Middlesex Turnpike. The south ward built its schoolhouse in 1791 at the head of Job Hill's lane, now Dudley Road; the Hill Schoolhouse stood on that lot until 2018. Houses of the 1840s on the road south of the mills include the Joseph Dane House and the Harvey Snow House.

The South Billerica post office opened with George W. Hill as postmaster on March 4, 1878, followed by Mary E. A. Libby on December 13, 1878. The narrow-gauge Billerica and Bedford Railroad ran through in 1877 and 1878, and the Boston and Lowell Railroad's standard-gauge Billerica and Bedford Branch followed in 1885, with the South Billerica Station at Spring Street, now Springs Road, where the Rhoda Kemp House stands on the corner. From 1901 the cars of the Lexington & Boston Street Railway ran along Concord Road past the summer colony of Riverhurst, with the Riverhurst Trolley Station there. The town voted a chemical engine for the South Billerica fire district in 1930.

In 1933 the Maryknoll Fathers opened a novitiate on the Stearns farm at 77 Dudley Road, around the Lt. John Stearns House, and from 1964 the property belonged to the Daughters of St. Paul. The Opening of Route 3 cut across the district in the 1950s, and new neighborhoods such as Ranlett Grove and Timber Creek followed. The Dudley Road farms, the Stearns houses and the river meadows became the Two Brothers Rocks-Dudley Road Historic District in 2010, and much of the riverbank is open land, including the Governor Thomas Dudley Park and the Ralph Hill Conservation Land.

References

1. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883): the Dudley farm from the Two Brothers, the Hill family, Hill's Mills and the leather-splitting machine, and the South Billerica postmasters
2. National Register nomination, Two Brothers Rocks-Dudley Road Historic District (2010): Dudley Road, the Stearns houses and the Maryknoll novitiate