Joseph Salter House (Rogers Street)

The Joseph Salter House stood on the southwest side of Rogers Street in North Billerica, between the road and the Concord River, just north of the Faulkner house lot. Joseph J. Salter, a carpenter from Epsom, New Hampshire, had built a house on Wilson Street on the west bank about 1846. He sold that house to C. P. Talbot in 1850 and moved across the river, where the house on the east bank appears under his name on the 1853 map. No recorded deed to Salter or his wife for this lot has been found in the grantee indexes before 1863. The lot lay between the Faulkner acre (bought by Francis Faulkner in 1833) and land of the Talbots, and the later deeds show it was held in the name of his wife, Hannah L. Salter.

In 1863 Charles P. Talbot and Thomas Talbot sold Salter ten acres 102 rods on the river south of the house, along the "Ford Way Road", with "a right of way which is forever to be kept open for the accommodation of said Salter" from the fordway road to "the road leading from Billerica Mill to the centre of the town", now Rogers Street. Joseph J. Salter died intestate on July 20, 1869 (not 1872, as Hazen has it). Dudley Foster was appointed administrator in September 1869 at the request of the widow, the two surviving children and the principal creditors, one of whom was C. P. Talbot & Co.

The widow then sold the property to the Talbots in two pieces. In September 1869 she sold them for $900 the land around the house, beginning at a stone post on the road "about four feet North of my former dwelling house" and running west to "the mill pond or river", keeping a private way for herself. On February 26, 1870 she sold them "a certain parcel of land with the buildings thereon" for $1,800: the house lot itself, about four rods on the road, bounded south by land of J. R. Faulkner & Co. A month later the administrator sold the ten-acre river lot at auction, and Hannah Salter bought it herself for $1,800.

The house became mill housing. After Charles P. Talbot's death his widow, Thomas Talbot and the other heirs, with the guardian of two minor Talbot heirs, conveyed the east-bank land of C. P. Talbot & Co. to the new corporation, Talbot Mills, in December 1884, by deeds that describe the land from "a fordway to Concord River" north to the end of the old Middlesex Canal towpath. In 1908 the Faulkner Manufacturing Company deeded the Talbot Mills a 6,200 square foot triangle along the line between the two properties. When the Talbot Mills divided its housing into lots in 1936, the Salter house became Lot 76 on Plan C-2 (Plan Book 60, Plan 46), 12,719 square feet with 100.6 feet on Rogers Street, bounded southeast by the Ceglansky lot (the old Faulkner house). The Salter Block behind it, built about 1865, became Lot 77.

In October 1939 the Talbot Mills sold Lots 76 and 77 and two Wilson Street lots to Joseph and Fannie Sidorovich of Maynard. They sold the house lot in June 1946 to Harley A. McCauley, whose mortgage that day says "The buildings on said premises are now numbered 1 on said Rogers Street." McCauley sold in 1950, and the house passed through several private owners and a realty trust, keeping the same Lot 76 description, until 2018, when a development company bought it together with the Salter Block lot. In 2020 the lots went to 1 Millstone Way LLC and were combined with the lot to the northwest as 25 Rogers Street. The old double house was taken down, and townhouses were built on the site in 2021 and 2022.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.272
2. Billerica assessor, 25 Rogers St (parcel 10-38-1): Lots 10-36, 10-37 and 10-38 combined for FY21; townhouses built about 2021.

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.