Charles A. Wright

Charles A. Wright (1872 to 1948), Charles Alvin Wright in full, was a Billerica Centre farmer who served the town as a fire engineer, its local food administrator in the First World War, and its tax collector in 1919. Hazen's genealogical register of 1883 lists him as Charles Alvin, born June 20, 1872, the eldest child of the contractor and selectman Josiah Wright and Emma L. Johnson of Stoneham, with a sister, Annie May, and a brother, Harry Allen. He is not to be confused with Chester A. Wright, a different Billerica man with the same initials who appears in the town reports of the 1920s. In 1908 the town paid him as administrator of the estate of his uncle Jackson Wright, a mechanic who had sharpened the town's lawn mowers and repaired the town clock and pump for years. The jury list of 1922 gives his occupation as farmer.

He was a Surveyor of Wood and Lumber in 1895 and 1896 and joined the Board of Fire Engineers in 1899, serving to 1903 with Lawrence W. Buckley and Warren Holden. As clerk of the board he signed its report in the 1903 town report, which said that the department at the Centre, troubled by poor drainage from the town stable, "can only be improved by a new building for the fire department." He was a Fish and Game Warden from 1907 to 1909, and at the annual meeting of 1908 his motion that eight hours be a day's labor for all mechanics and laborers employed by the town was carried. Back on the Board of Engineers from 1914 to 1917, he pressed the matter again: in 1915 the town voted $5,000 for a fireproof fire station at Billerica Centre and named him to the building committee with Ralph E. Manning and Elmer E. Cole. Their report proposed a brick building 62 feet long by 44 feet wide, holding four pieces of apparatus, on a lot of G. E. Stearns on River Street to be taken by eminent domain, at an estimated $6,200, but at the 1916 meeting the town set the plan aside and asked for a special meeting on other locations.

During the war he chaired the town's Food Production Committee, and in March 1918 he became Billerica's local Food Administrator under the county administrator. His report describes more than three hundred letters, about 250 calls at stores, a flour inventory of the town's families and some 620 sugar cards issued for home canning, work his wife carried on while he was confined to bed for two months. He kept track of flour sales through reports from the grocers and wrote that "About ninety per cent. of our citizens were loyal" and gave him no trouble.

Wright was elected Collector of Taxes in 1919, but in 1920 he finished second with 252 votes to John J. Ritchie's 292. That year the town elected him director of demonstration work in agriculture and home economics under the Middlesex County Bureau, and he sat on the Board of Health in 1920 and 1921. He was also a long-serving election officer for Precinct One at the Town Hall in the Centre, as inspector, clerk, warden and finally deputy clerk, from 1899 into the early 1930s. He died on August 26, 1948, aged 76.

References

1. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), Genealogical Register p. 166 (Charles Alvin, son of Josiah Wright, b. June 20, 1872)
2. Billerica Town Report 1903, report of the Fire Engineers signed by Charles A. Wright, Clerk
3. Billerica Town Report 1908, payment to Charles A. Wright, administrator of Jackson Wright
4. Billerica Town Report 1909, town meeting (Chas. A. Wright's eight hour day motion carried)
5. Billerica Town Report 1915, report of the Fire Station committee signed by Charles A. Wright
6. Billerica Town Report 1918, report of the local Food Administrator, Charles A. Wright
7. Billerica Town Report 1919, report of the Collector of Taxes signed by Charles A. Wright
8. Billerica Town Report 1920, town election (Collector of Taxes: Ritchie 292, Wright 252)
9. Billerica Town Report 1922, jury list (Charles A. Wright, farmer)
10. Billerica Town Report 1948, deaths recorded in 1948 (Charles Alvin Wright, Aug. 26, aged 76)