Shawsheen Schoolhouse

The Shawsheen Schoolhouse was the one-room school of Billerica's Shawsheen ward, School District Number 8, on the north side of Cook Street at the corner of what is now Pines Road, in the southeast corner of the town near the Burlington line. It was one of the ten district schoolhouses of nineteenth-century Billerica.

When a town committee reported in September 1791 on where the squadron schoolhouses should stand, it placed the Shawsheen ward house "at the corner of Lieut. John Farmer's and Ebenezer Richardson, Jr.'s, land", 16 by 16 feet, at a cost of 20 pounds (Hazen, 1883). No deed was recorded for that first house, as for most of the 1791 schoolhouses.

On March 24, 1841, James Bennett of Billerica, gentleman, sold "the Inhabitants of School District Numbered Eight" a lot of "twenty square rods", five rods along "the Road leading from the Boston Road to Wm Gleasons" (Cook Street, which led past the Gleason farm, later College Farm) and four rods deep, with Patrick McManagle's land on the west and Bennett's own land on the other sides, for $5 (Middlesex South Book 401 Page 499; Billerica town book 16, page 418). Bennett, who owned some thirty parcels around Cook Street, including the Gleason wood land, the old Richardson farm and the Fanny Cook land, died intestate soon afterward, and the appraisal of his estate in 1842 lists them all. His family kept the woodland around the schoolhouse for seventy years: the Bennetts' release of 1890 and the deeds of 1912 describe the seventy-acre "wood land" on the Shawsheen road as running "to the school house lot; thence northerly and then easterly to the Shawshine road".

The school committee's reports follow District No. 8 through the 1850s and 1860s; in 1854 a summer teacher gave up for her health and the winter term opened with conduct that "called for severe rebuke from the Committee", and in 1862 the summer school was "very small, the average attendance being but eleven". After the district system was abolished in 1869 the town ran the school. By 1890 it had closed, and the few children of the neighborhood were carried to the Crosby School on Wyman Road. In 1909 the school committee wrote that "some disposition of the Shawsheen school building should be made. It is not at all probable that it will ever again be used for school purposes and it is now in a very dilapidated condition."

* Wages in 1853-54 were reported including board. No district census was taken after the districts were abolished in 1869. The 1870-71 report gives no figures.

In May 1912 Edwin A. Bennett sold the seventy acres around the schoolhouse to James E. Burke of Medford, who passed them the same day to Frank W. Coughlin of Brookline. Coughlin had the land surveyed in June 1912 as The Pines, a development of small lots between Cook Street and the Shawsheen River (Plan Book 30, Plan 13), leaving the corner lot at Cook Street and Pines Road marked "School House". A Land Court survey of January 1914 for the land across Cook Street draws the old building on that corner. The 1910 town meeting voted to reopen the Shawsheen School, but the building was not fit to use; the 1914 warrant proposed selling the unused Shawsheen, Crosby, Spaulding and Hill schoolhouses. The town still owned the building on April 10, 1915, when the fire department answered an alarm at the "School House (Pinehurst Dist.) owned by Town of Billerica", with $200 of damage. The children were sent to the Centre schools until the town built a new two-room "Shawsheen Schoolhouse", the Pinehurst School, on Boston Road in 1922, on a lot bought from Josiah Hardwick.

No deed out of the district or the town has been found. The old schoolhouse lot is still a separate, unbuilt parcel of about 0.13 acre on Cook Street at Pines Road (Assessors Map 82, Parcel 86), carried on the tax rolls in the name of the heirs of Frank W. Coughlin, and a 2005 deed of the neighboring lots on Pines Road still bounds them "by land marked 'School House'".

The schoolhouse stood on the 1841 lot at the corner of Cook Street and Pines Road.

References

1. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), pp. 256-257: the 1791 report placing the Shawshin ward schoolhouse at the corner of Lieut. John Farmer's and Ebenezer Richardson Jr.'s land

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.