C. P. Talbot Mill Worker Housing at 8 Lowell St

The C. P. Talbot Mill Worker Housing at 8 Lowell Street is a company house built in the early 1860s by C. P. Talbot and Co. for workers at the Talbot Mills in North Billerica. It stands at the northwest end of the triangle between Old Elm Street, Lowell Street and Colson Street that the village called "the Common", and it was one of three houses the company built on the Common in the early 1860s, with the houses at 2-4 Lowell Street and 27-29 Old Elm Street.

The land was part of the mill grant the town made to Capt. Christopher Osgood in 1708. In 1783 the Carleton heirs sold "about forty Acres" of it on the west side of the Concord River, "Westerly on the highway", to Thomas Richardson, and in 1794 Richardson sold the forty acres with the mills to the Proprietors of the Middlesex Canal. The canal laid out a private way across its land northwest from the county road (now Lowell Street), which cut off a triangle between that way, the county road and "the road leading to the Canal" (now Colson Street).

On September 22, 1851 the canal company sold all its Billerica land, in eleven parcels drawn on a plan by R. H. Eddy, to Charles P. Talbot of Lowell and Thomas Talbot of Billerica for $20,000. Parcel G was the triangle: from a point on the county road 51 feet west of Israel Colson's lot, 362 feet along the road "to a stake and stones northeasterly from said Colson's house", 90 feet on a curve to the road leading to the canal, 345 feet north to "the private way laid out by the Proprietors", and back along the way. The Talbots built their mill in 1857 and put up housing for its workers along the roads nearby. In 1870 Thomas Talbot built the North Billerica Baptist Church at the Colson Street corner of the Common, and his brother released his half of the church lot, which the two "held in common".

In 1884 Thomas Talbot and the heirs of Charles P. Talbot conveyed the village land to the new corporation, The Talbot Mills, which rented the house to its workers for the next fifty-five years. When the company divided its village into house lots on the Monahan plan of 1936, the house became Lot 59 of Plan B, 18,163 square feet with 182.8 feet on Lowell Street and 197.1 feet on Colson Street. On October 23, 1939 The Talbot Mills sold it to Newell A. and Ethel Hoyt of Lowell, "the land ... with the buildings thereon", described as "a part of the fourth parcel" of the 1884 deeds, and took back a $1,500 mortgage. The company kept the right to the common sewer that ran under the lot.

The Hoyts sold the house in 1947 to William S. and Elizabeth P. Mansfield of Chelmsford. It was sold to a private owner in 1958 and has changed hands privately several times since, most recently in 2021. A porch was added after 1887. The house is a contributing building in the Billerica Mills National Register district (1983) and the local historic district (1992).

References

1. MACRIS BIL.81
2. Billerica assessor, 8 Lowell St (parcel 9-104-0): Lot 59, Plan Book 60 Plan 28, 0.417 acres, built about 1860

Deed References Expand all

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