Person

Samuel Sage

Samuel Sage was a land surveyor who came to Billerica from Bedford in 1869 and owned the Shedd Family Homestead on Concord Road, the house lot of the first Daniel Shed. As Samuel Sage Jr. of Bedford he surveyed land in that town in the 1850s: in 1856 he drew the plan that divided the Bedford property of Thomas G. Atkins on Dudley Road, by the Concord River, into a 56-acre homestead lot and a 75-acre lot across the road.

In 1869 he bought the old Shed homestead, a short way south of the Common, which he and then his widow held for fifty years. He married Martha Hill, a descendant of the old Billerica Hill family; she taught at the Centre Grammar School until 1890, wrote and read the paper "Old Families of the First Parish" at the church's centennial in 1898, and was one of the active organizers of the Billerica Historical Society. In May 1871 the town and the First Baptist Church and Society divided their road frontage on the Boston road by a plan he surveyed and sold it in lots the same day; Sage took Lot 1 himself (see Charles Lund House). In 1873 he sold a third of an acre to George W. Wilson of Chelsea, owner of the Nathaniel Davidson House, and in 1876 granted him a drain right. When Hazen published his History of Billerica in 1883 he thanked "Mrs. Samuel Sage" for the use of valuable surveys and papers.

Samuel Sage had died by 1889, when the town map gives the homestead to his widow, Mrs. M. H. Sage. In 1915 land of the heirs of Samuel Sage still bounded the house lot at 46 Concord Road on the north and east. Martha H. Sage sold the homestead in 1919 to Frank R. Holden and died on May 8, 1922, aged 86.

Samuel Sage

Samuel Sage

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