Union Hall

Union Hall stood on the north side of the road from the mills to the North Billerica Railroad Depot, the street later called Union Hall Street, then Carleton Street and now Station Street, just west of the depot. It began in 1870 as the town's new school-house for North Billerica, became the village's public hall, polling place and fire station, and stood, in its second form, until about 1967. Its lot still belongs to the Town and is part of the commuter rail parking lot.

The land was part of the old Thomas Rogers farm, which William E. Faulkner bought in 1831. After his death in 1861 his heirs released it to his brother James R. Faulkner, among it "six acres, more or less" of back land that ran down the Boston and Lowell Railroad to "the road leading to the depot". The School Committee had recommended that the crowded schools of what had been Districts 4 and 6 be "united in a building large enough for all the pupils ... somewhere in the village of North Billerica". By a deed of March 5, 1870, recorded April 13, James R. Faulkner and his brother Charles Faulkner of Boston sold "the Inhabitants of the town of Billerica" for $500 a lot "in that part of Billerica called North Billerica" on "the cross road leading from main road to the Depot", 136 feet on the road and bounded east by the railroad and by land of C. P. Talbot and Company. That deed is still the Town's title.

The new house was finished in 1870, and "at the opening of the autumn term" the North Billerica schools moved in, a grammar school under Miss Sarah Burt of Wilmington and a primary school under Miss Carrie Hartford. The committee wrote that the two schools "appear well in their new, pleasant rooms" and that "a new reign among the scholars seems in great measure to have commenced." One of the old district school-houses was kept for a mixed school. By the 1880s the building was known as Union Hall, and its upper hall was let for meetings and entertainments, with a stage and rules for its janitor. The Episcopal mission of St. Anne's, organized in North Billerica in 1886, first held its services there, but the hall was thought "entirely unfit for worship, owing to its secular uses and appearance," and the mission built its own church in 1889. The 1880 plan of the Faulkner Manufacturing Company shows the lot with its "School House" next to the railroad station.

On February 22, 1891, the building caught fire. The North Billerica company fought it "stubbornly for some time but owing to the peculiar construction of roof were finally obliged to call for aid from Lowell", and the building was a total loss, insured for $8,000. The school property was saved and the children were crowded into the Talbot School. The town rebuilt at once to plans by the architect F. W. Stickney, with D. W. Fitch as contractor ($7,300) and H. C. Brown for the pump and piping, paying for it with the insurance money and the $1,530 from the sale of the old engine house and its land on Wilson Street. The new Union Hall had the fire station on the ground floor, with a hose-drying tower on its west front, and the hall and schoolrooms above; a steam fire engine came in 1892, and the town kept horses there to draw it. In the mid-1890s the Selectmen built a wall and fence around the lot, the Talbot Mills paying part of the cost of the retaining wall, and the town voted $100 to sink a well there.

For sixty years Union Hall was the town's second public building. From the division of the town into precincts it was the polling place of Precinct Two, and town warrants were posted there. The Union Hall Grammar, Intermediate and Primary schools used its rooms into the 1920s; in 1924 one class was still taught there, and in 1928 the old schoolroom was made over into a permanent polling booth. A private kindergarten met there about 1901, and the police station was in the building in the 1900s and 1910s. The Danforth Lodge No. 117, Knights of Pythias, organized in 1895, met "over Union Hall," and the Asa Pollard Lodge No. 7741 of the Odd Fellows (Manchester Unity), organized in 1902, met there on the first and third Thursdays for thirty years. In 1914 the town voted $100 to strengthen the hall so that the upper floor could be used for basketball, and in 1929 the Howe School teams were still playing their home games there "under poor conditions." In 1932 a committee found the upper floor used for social gatherings by the Garden City Improvement Association, Billerica Post 116 of the American Legion and its auxiliary, with the fire department in the lower front part, and advised that the hall "is a valuable asset to North Billerica and should be retained by the Town."

After the Second World War the hall was used less and less. The town repaired and painted it in 1949 and 1950, and in 1953 fitted up three rooms so that permanent firemen could live at the station. Lightning struck the tower in 1955. By 1962 the fire chief reported that the second floor "has not been used for many years and is in very poor condition." A new North Billerica fire station, the Billerica Fire Station at 21 Lowell Street, was built from 1965 and opened in 1967, and in May 1967 the Selectmen approved razing Union Hall. A plan to give it to the Disabled American Veterans was delayed, vandals set the empty building on fire, and it was taken down by John Farmer. The Town still owns the lot, which is now part of the parking lot of the North Billerica commuter rail station.

References

1. Billerica assessor, parcel 10-48-0, Station St: Town of Billerica (B + M Parking Lot), 0.459 acre; current deed Book 72 Page 580 (1870)
2. Annual Report of the Town of Billerica, 1891: the fire that destroyed Union Hall and its schoolrooms
3. Annual Report of the Town of Billerica, 1892: Union Hall rebuilding account (D. W. Fitch, F. W. Stickney, H. C. Brown)
4. Annual Report of the Town of Billerica, 1903: Art. 28, Union Hall Street renamed Carleton Street

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.