Lucy B. Collier

Lucy Bryant Collier was born in 1877 and married the lawyer Forrest F. Collier in Chelsea in 1903. He was a Harvard graduate who practiced in Boston and Billerica, served as a Billerica selectman in 1918, was often retained as counsel by the town, and was an accomplished violinist. Their first son, Bryant Foster Collier, died in infancy in 1908; their son Abram Thurlow Collier was born in Billerica in 1913. Abram went on to become chief executive of the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company and a life trustee of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

From at least 1923 to 1941 Mrs. Collier was president of the Bennett Public Library Association, which managed the town library. Her report for 1923 describes new bookcases that put the juvenile books within the children's reach, the cleaning and classifying of the bird collection given by Dr. Albert H. Tuttle, and reading certificates for children who read five books from the state lists. By 1932 circulation had reached 36,357 books, and her reports for 1940 and 1941 describe the new children's room, opened in January 1940 in the room formerly occupied by the Billerica Historical Society, "with colorful furniture and hangings," story hours that drew fifty to eighty children, and the Pinehurst branch. In 1925 she also gave the town several strips of land along the west shore of the Concord River and the old Middlesex Turnpike for the Town Forest being assembled by Warren H. Manning's committee.

She sat on the Finance Committee in 1930 and 1931, signing its report to the special town meeting of September 1931 as secretary. When the town created a Planning Board in 1931 she was named to it with Thomas Talbot Clark, and she was elected to a three year term in 1932 with 1,361 votes. Her long campaign on the board was for zoning. In 1932 the town elected a Planning Board "but declined to provide it with zoning by-laws." In 1936 the board elected her chairman, signing as Mrs. Forrest F. Collier, and held meetings in various sections of the town on proposed zoning by-laws drawn up with the help of the planning boards of Carlisle, Bedford and Concord, which it "earnestly" urged the voters to adopt, together with a by-law on billboards. She was re-elected to the board in 1938 over Walter H. Poirier, 1,564 to 967, and served on the committees named in 1938 and 1939 to codify the town by-laws, which her 1939 report called the groundwork for future zoning.

From 1941 she served as the board's secretary under Egbert Hans and then George H. Spillane. The goal was finally reached when the special town meeting of July 30, 1945 adopted Billerica's first Zoning By-Law and zoning map, approved by the Attorney General the next day; in 1946 the board held nineteen public hearings under it. Lucy B. Collier died on August 20, 1947, aged 69, and was buried in the North Cemetery in Billerica. Her husband, who later moved to Miami, died there in 1970 and was also buried in the North Cemetery.

References

1. Report of the Bennett Public Library Association, 1923, p. 73 (signed Mrs. Lucy B. Collier, President)
2. Town Forest gifts accepted at town meeting, 1925, p. 31 (B.T.F. 14: Mrs. Lucy B. Collier to Town of Billerica)
3. Town officers, 1930 (Finance Committee: Lucy B. Collier)
4. Report of the Planning Board, 1932, p. 117 (town declined zoning by-laws)
5. Report of the Planning Board, 1936 (Mrs. Forrest F. Collier elected chairman; proposed zoning by-laws)
6. Annual Report of the Planning Board, 1939, p. 90 (signed Lucy B. Collier, Chairman)
7. Report of the Bennett Public Library Association, 1941, p. 89 (childrens room; signed Lucy B. Collier, President)
8. Report of the Planning Board, 1945, p. 93 (Zoning By-Law adopted July 30, 1945; signed as Secretary)
9. Deaths recorded in 1947, p. 75 (Lucy B. Collier, Aug. 20, aged 69 y 10 m)
10. Lucy Bryant Collier (1877-1947), Find a Grave (North Cemetery; husband and children)