World War I

Type	War
Date	April 6, 1917 to November 11, 1918

Billerica entered the First World War with the rest of the country on April 6, 1917, a town of 3,246 people at the state census of 1915 and growing toward the 4,500 estimated in 1919 as the new Boston and Maine shops at North Billerica drew workers and their families. By the end of 1918 the selectmen counted "two hundred forty-three men in the military and naval service, more than eight per cent. of our total inhabitants." The war reached the town through its schools, its town meetings and the committees that rationed food and coal. The influenza epidemic struck in the autumn of 1918, and six of the town's young men died in the war. It left behind a Legion post, a town medal, a captured German gun and squares named for the dead.

The first effects were small and local. "At the declaration of war a U. S. flag was placed in every school room," Superintendent Eugene C. Vining wrote, and the town's tree warden, John W. Bostwick, is listed among the officers of 1917 as "(Enlisted)"; Fred L. Winship took his place. At a special town meeting on June 30, 1917 the town declined to accept Chapter 254 of the Acts of 1917, which allowed towns to continue the pay of employees who enlisted, after the Finance Committee advised that "all who enlist should be treated alike, and as this Act applies only to Town employees and not to all townsmen who enlist, they do not recommend that it be accepted." The fish warden, John M. Kennelly, asked that his salary be divided between the Red Cross and the Knights of Columbus "to aid in a small way the Billerica boys at the front." In February 1918 the committee that had planned an addition to the Billerica Town Hall (1895) advised against spending $15,000, noting that "already more than one hundred of the finest representatives of our citizenship in Billerica are wearing the uniform of the United States Army."

Much of the home front was organized by the Billerica Public Safety Committee. Its Soldiers and Sailors Information Bureau, under the Rev. Walton H. Doggett, compiled a record of each man's age, birthplace, enlistment, unit and family, which it turned over to the town for a permanent Record Book. Charles A. Wright, who had chaired the Food Production Committee for nearly a year, was appointed local Food Administrator in March 1918, with a staff named by the Public Safety Committee: Mrs. William H. Sexton for food saving, Thomas F. Sheridan for food control, Neil R. Mahoney for the retail merchants and Edgar P. Sellew for hotels and clubs. Wright's flour inventory in April found 319 families holding more than the government allowance, and between June 15 and October 20 he issued 620 canning sugar cards; he made about 250 calls at stores before the town was released from the regulations on December 7, 1918. A Fuel Committee appointed by the state fuel administrator, James J. Storrow, in November 1917, first Harold T. Nowell, Albert H. Jones and Sellew and from January 1918 Sellew, William H. Sexton and Richard T. Perry, fixed local coal prices and allotted the supply. The winter of 1917 and 1918, it wrote, "was the coldest on record"; in North Billerica the situation "became so critical that Mr. Warren H. Manning kindly loaned several tons of his supply," and seizing coal in transit through the town was proposed as a last resort. For 1918 and 1919 the town was allotted 4,500 net tons against an estimated need of 6,850.

The town's money followed. A special town meeting on May 8, 1918 voted $3,000 "for the benefit of soldiers, sailors and marines in the service of the United States or their dependents," $200 for War Savings Stamp publicity, $500 for war gardens, $500 for Red Cross work and $500 for organizations working for the welfare of the men "or for patriotic purposes generally," and took no action on an article for the relief of Belgian, French, Polish and other war sufferers. In July the Finance Committee recommended a further $2,000 for military aid, $1,500 for soldiers' relief and $500 for state aid, "made necessary by the unusual conditions arising from the war." In 1918 the town paid $3,935 in state aid for "German War Cases," against $440 for the remaining Civil War cases, and the Public Safety account paid for honor rolls, a service flag, an enrollment book, a band and speakers. The annual meeting of February 9, 1918 instructed the selectmen to print in each annual report a list of those who had entered the service, with their branch, regiment, company or ship.

The schools took part in what Vining called "the numerous drives and campaigns which the exigencies of the times have forced upon us." In 1917 "the problems of enlistment, draft, food conservation, Liberty loans, stamp savings" were discussed with the pupils, and home and school gardens, canning demonstrations, the Red Triangle Fund and the sale of Liberty bonds and war savings stamps followed; the scarcity of labor drew boys of sixteen to eighteen into war work at more than $25 a week. In May 1918 a High School service flag of forty stars was dedicated; by the end of the year it had sixty-one, besides six former pupils in the Student Army Training Corps. The High School gave $90 to the Red Cross and $425 to the United War Work campaign, the Talbot and Pollard schools gave smaller sums, and the children bought between $4,200 and $4,300 in War Savings Stamps. Women teachers were given "a war-time increase of fifty dollars."

The influenza epidemic reached Billerica in the latter part of September 1918. On October 8 the Lowell Sun reported fifteen cases in North Billerica in a few days and one death, while the village's Fourth Liberty Loan drive lagged and a war relic train was expected there on Monday, October 14. The Board of Health, Dr. E. J. Alley, Thomas A. Ellis and Dr. Neil K. Forhan, reported about 450 cases and nineteen deaths by January 1919; two physicians were sent by the State Department of Health, and the board closed the churches, schools and libraries and forbade public gatherings for three weeks. The schools lost an unusually long period, and their opening in January 1919 was again delayed by the disease. The town did better in the last loan: for having the greatest number of subscribers to the Fifth, or Victory, Liberty Loan among towns under 5,000 in the district, Billerica was awarded a captured German cannon in 1919, which was fastened to a concrete foundation on the triangle of the Talbot Mills at North Billerica with a tablet placed by the company. A proposal in 1941 to move the "Artillery Piece" to the oval and repaint it in camouflage was dismissed.

The honor list printed in the report for 1918 gives about 240 names. Most served in the Army in France or at Camp Devens; others were in the Navy and the Student Army Training Corps, and one woman, Lillian Balmforth, served as a "Yeowoman, 1st class" in the Naval Reserve in Boston. Among them were Captain Herbert B. Hosmer of Battery A, 71st Regiment, Coast Artillery Corps; Lieutenant Harry Dunlap Brown, regimental bombing officer of the 18th Infantry; Lieutenant Ralph E. Manning of the Quartermaster Department; Dr. Neil K. Forhan of the Medical Reserve Corps; Dr. A. Warren Stearns, assistant surgeon at the Mare Island naval station; Corporal John W. Bostwick and Mechanic Thomas Q. Nickerson of Battery F, 102nd Field Artillery, 26th Division; and Corporal Laurence J. Greenwood of the Motor Transport Corps. Town Clerk Albert S. Bull resigned to enter naval aviation; Herbert A. King filled the office until Bull came home after the armistice and was reappointed.

The list marks five men as "Gone Home": Frederick H. Casey, Harold W. Estey, Corporal Robert L. Fisk of the aviation service, William H. McGrath and Winthrop A. Wright, the last three with the American Expeditionary Forces. The state's roll of the dead lists Estey as a major, of Boston, McGrath as a private of North Billerica and Wright as a private of Billerica, all as having died of disease. Fisk, aged twenty-two, was buried in Billerica on October 7, 1918. Before the war Estey had been a captain in the First Corps of Cadets of the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia. When the dead were named at the welcome home in July 1919 there were six, with Albert A. Welcome, of the medical detachment of the 146th Infantry, and the Lowell Sun also named Isaac Newell Jr., apparently as having died soon after his discharge.

The town's "Welcome Home" celebration on July 4 and 5, 1919 was, the selectmen wrote, "the greatest ever held in this town." The parade formed on Colson Street in North Billerica and marched by Talbot Avenue to the Centre, with Laurence J. Greenwood as chief marshal, Civil War veterans in automobiles, the Billerica soldiers and sailors under Captain Hosmer, the Spanish War Veterans and floats of the Red Cross, the Grange, the lodges and the improvement associations. On the Town Common Thomas F. Sheridan, chairman of the selectmen, gave the address of welcome, Congressman John Jacob Rogers spoke, and Doggett, assisted by Selectman Thomas Talbot Clark, presented the bronze medals for which town meeting, on the motion of Forrest F. Collier, had voted $500 in February. The medal, a cross with an eagle and the town seal, was inscribed "Presented to her gallant sons of the American Expeditionary Force in grateful recognition of their part in the World War 1917-1918"; the medals of the dead were given to their relatives, and a bugler sounded taps. A banquet for the service men followed in the Town Hall, with sports on the Kohlrausch Park playground and a ball the next day.

A permanent memorial was debated for two years. The annual meeting of February 14, 1920 named a committee to confer with Billerica Post No. 116 of the American Legion, whose members, the committee found, lived mostly in North Billerica. The two committees agreed that "a permanent building that would be of service, rather than a monument, should be the memorial," and suggested a Legion trophy room in an extension of the Town Hall and a club room in the North village. A special meeting on June 21, 1920 defeated, 72 to 68, a motion for a site committee and $800 for plans of a memorial building. In 1921 the committee, Thomas F. Sheridan, George P. Greenwood, Thomas F. Lyons, Warren H. Manning and Herbert A. King, put the cost of a suitable building at about $75,000 and of a Town Hall extension with a Legion room at $20,000 or more, and advised waiting "until building prices are reduced to a normal basis." The meeting of February 12, 1921 instead voted $200 to provide quarters for Post 116 at North Billerica, and the town paid for its quarters through the 1920s; in 1932 it asked for the free use of rooms in Union Hall. A second post, Harold W. Estey Post No. 268, named for the major, was active by the early 1930s.

In 1921 the town also appointed a committee to consider naming squares at street intersections "in memory of its residents who died in the service of their country during the World War"; in 1922 its report was accepted and no action was taken. McGrath Square, the North Billerica junction where Treble Cove Road meets Pollard and Wilson Streets, appears under that name in the warrant of 1924. The square at Andover Road and Pond Street was named Winthrop A. Wright Square by the annual meeting of 1941, which voted $25 for a marker, and in 1938 the junction of Lexington Road and Pond Lane was named for James Reddy, "a World War veteran and a hero who gave his life to save the lives of two children in Nuttings Lake on February 13, 1937." Pershing Street, laid out in September 1917, probably took its name from the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces. The dead of the war are now listed on the World War Memorials on the Common, and the town's Memorial Day exercises were for many years run by a committee of the two Legion posts, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Spanish War veterans.

People

John W. Bostwick: Tree Warden who enlisted in 1917; corporal, Battery F, 102nd Field Artillery, 26th Division, in France.
Fred L. Winship: Appointed Tree Warden in 1917 when John W. Bostwick enlisted.
Charles A. Wright: Chairman of the Food Production Committee and from March 1918 Billerica's local Food Administrator.
William H. Sexton: Member of the Billerica Fuel Committee from January 1918; his wife had charge of food saving on the food administration staff.
Thomas F. Sheridan: Food control member of the food administration staff; chairman of the selectmen who gave the welcome home address in 1919 and chaired the memorial committee of 1920-21.
Neil R. Mahoney: Retail merchants' representative on the local food administration staff, 1918.
Edgar P. Sellew: Member and from January 1918 chairman of the Billerica Fuel Committee; hotels and clubs member of the food administration staff.
Harold T. Nowell: First chairman of the Billerica Fuel Committee, November 1917, until he moved from town in January 1918.
Albert H. Jones: Original member of the Billerica Fuel Committee, November 1917; resigned January 1918.
Prescott L. Pasho: Selectman on whose recommendation the state fuel administrator appointed the Fuel Committee in November 1917.
Richard T. Perry: Member of the Billerica Fuel Committee from January 1918.
Warren H. Manning: Lent tons of his own coal to North Billerica in the winter of 1917-18; member of the World War memorial committee of 1920-21.
Eugene C. Vining: Superintendent of Schools who reported on the schools' war work, service flag and war savings stamp sales.
E J. Alley: Member of the Board of Health during the influenza epidemic of 1918.
Thomas A. Ellis: Member of the Board of Health during the influenza epidemic of 1918 (himself a Spanish-American War veteran).
Neil K. Forhan: Board of Health member and first lieutenant, Medical Reserve Corps, Camp Greenleaf, Georgia.
Albert S. Bull: Town Clerk who resigned in 1918 to enter naval aviation and was reappointed after the armistice.
Herbert A. King: Acting Town Clerk in 1918; member of the 1920-21 committee on a memorial to Billerica service men.
Thomas T. Clark: Selectman who helped present the town medals at the welcome home of July 4, 1919.
Forrest F. Collier: Selectman in 1918 and mover of the 1919 vote of $500 to recognize the town's service men.
Herbert B. Hosmer: Captain, Battery A, 71st Regiment, Coast Artillery Corps, in France; commanded the service men in the 1919 welcome home parade.
Harry D. Brown: First lieutenant and regimental bombing officer, 18th Infantry, in France; later commander of the Harold W. Estey Post, American Legion.
Albert W. Stearns: First lieutenant and assistant surgeon, U.S. Naval Training Station, Mare Island, California.
Ralph E. Manning: First lieutenant, Quartermaster Department, Services of Supply, in France.
Thomas Q. Nickerson: Mechanic, Battery F, 102nd Field Artillery, in France.
Laurence J. Greenwood: Corporal, Motor Transport Corps, Fort Bliss, Texas; chief marshal of the 1919 welcome home parade.
George P. Greenwood: Member of the 1920-21 committee that conferred with the Legion on a memorial to Billerica service men.

World War I

World War I

People

References