Opening of the Middlesex County House of Correction

Type	Construction
Date	December 31, 1931

The Middlesex County House of Correction, the county jail on Treble Cove Road in West Billerica, was built in 1930 and 1931 on the old Winning Farm and has been in use there ever since. Chapter 381 of the Acts of 1929 provided for a new house of correction for the county, because the old one at Cambridge had been "deemed unsafe for occupancy by the Commonwealth, through its Department of Public Safety." The plan called for a farm. A. Warren Stearns, the Billerica-born state Commissioner of Correction, urged that the prisoners work the land and raise their own food, holding that productive work in healthful surroundings would make them better citizens on their release. The buildings themselves are described in the article House of Correction. Its later growth, and the expansion of 2014, are told under Expansion of the Middlesex County House of Correction.

The search for a site began on October 17, 1929. Both places the county weighed were in Billerica and both had enough farm land for the commissioners' purpose: the farm on Treble Cove Road and an adjoining tract on the Carlisle line owned by a Dr. Welsh. The county took the land by eminent domain on March 21, 1930, in nine parcels "lying on both sides of the road running between said Billerica and Carlisle, known as Treble Cove Road, formerly called Concord Road," about 500 acres in all. Most of it was reported bought from J. Edward Maloney of the Boston area for $53,000, although it was assessed at $18,700; he had acquired it a few months before from his brother-in-law, Edward F. Murphy. This was the farm beside Winning Pond that the Winning family had held for three generations and that John M. Bailey, who bought it in 1872, made known for his trials of ensilage. The county planned to keep the three houses on the land and a 16-acre cranberry bog that yielded 1,000 bushels a year.

Ground was broken in the summer of 1930, in the first year of the Great Depression. Charles R. Greco of Boston designed the main building, cell blocks and service building, and the state Department of Public Safety approved his plans on December 1, 1930. Billerica's inspector of buildings, Roger Barrington, entered $874,000 for the "County House of Correction, West Billerica" among the permits of 1930, against $307,728 for all taxable building in town that year and $127,606 for the new Howe High School; he added another $45,000 for the prison in 1931. The buildings were finished by December 31, 1931, when the prisoners were transferred and a chaplain and doctor appointed. The main building and cell blocks held up to 300 men, and a dormitory held 80 more who worked the dairy farm across the road. A warden's house went up beside the old farmhouse.

The town felt the new institution at once. In his report for 1931 the fire chief wrote that "in the West Billerica section there promises to be a rapid land development. With the new House of Correction, and other building operations, we believe an extension of the Fire Alarm and a piece of fire apparatus will be necessary in the future," and he recommended running the fire alarm line to the prison "as requested by Charles H. Richardson, Master." The relation was a neighborly one. In 1943 the fire chief thanked "Mr. Loring R. Kew, Master of the House of Correction, his Officers and men for their valuable assistance in several emergencies during the year," and repeated the thanks in 1944. County extension agents held twilight meetings on dairy breeding at the prison farm in 1953, the town's evening school set out to offer courses to the inmates in 1967, and the library ran a library at the jail on a one-year grant in 1977. In 1970 town meeting stood in silence for Sheriff Howard Fitzpatrick and John Brocklesby, Master of the House of Correction, and in 1972 it voted $10,000 for a town dog pound, the "building to be erected on House of Correction grounds."

Much of the county's farm land later passed to the town. Chapter 486 of the Acts of 1979 put the land on the southeasterly side of Treble Cove Road in the care of the county commissioners as a park, and in 1994 the county deeded those 194 acres to the town as Vietnam Veterans Park. Inmates in the jail's work release program helped three veterans' organizations finish the Vietnam memorial there in 1986, painted classrooms at Shawsheen Valley Technical High School in 1989 and 1991, and later worked on the town's fields and on the cleanup of the Middlesex Canal along Lowell Street. In 1985 the fire department sought state money for its alarm and communication system on the ground that the town served the House of Correction, the state forest and the MBTA land, "all of which are State/County property." In 1989 Selectman Thomas H. Conway Jr. told town meeting that the county had more than two hundred acres in the area that it wished to dispose of.

People

Albert W. Stearns: State Commissioner of Correction who urged the farm plan under which the jail was built in Billerica.
Roger W. Barrington: Inspector of buildings who recorded the $874,000 permit for the House of Correction in 1930.
Thomas H. Conway Jr.: Selectman who told the 1989 town meeting the county wished to dispose of over 200 acres near the jail.

Opening of the Middlesex County House of Correction

Opening of the Middlesex County House of Correction

People

References