Aaron Tuttle House

The Aaron Tuttle House stood on the south side of Baldwin Road in southeast Billerica, on the lot that is now 41 Baldwin Road. The 1853 Walling map marks a house here as "D. Carter", on the road east from Allen Road just west of the fork where one road ran north toward Pine Street and another southeast to the farm of George K. Carter, with Deacon Thomas B. Edmunds by the fork. The recorded deeds do not show any D. Carter owning the place, and the name on the map may be that of a tenant. The lot was a narrow strip of about three acres running back from the road between the land of the Marshall heirs and Thomas B. Edmunds on the west and the Carter farm on the east, bounded at the back by a trout brook.

The earliest recorded deed is dated June 1, 1853, when Aaron Tuttle of Billerica, a shoemaker, sold the place to Asa Putney of New Haven, Connecticut, an engineer, for $325. The deed describes "a parcel of land situated in the South-easterly part of said Billerica with the buildings thereon standing", bounded on "the Southerly fork of the road leading from Wilmington to said Billerica" and "throughout by land of George K. Carter", who signed as a witness. Tuttle's wife Mary Ann released her dower. No deed into Tuttle was ever recorded. The Carter land next door had passed under the 1841 will of George Carter to his sons George K. and Joseph M. Carter, and the small lot may first have been cut from it.

The Putney family kept the place for half a century. After Asa G. Putney's death his widow Sophronia A. Putney released it in 1896 to their son Herbert V. Putney, and in 1905 Herbert, his wife Hannah, and the other heirs of Asa G. Putney sold the "land with the buildings thereon" to Ellen T. Brady of Boston for $125. The Bradys of Boston held it until 1954, when John F. Brady Jr., as administrator of the estate of John F. Brady and together with the other heirs, sold it to Roger A. and Gloria H. Toothaker. The 1954 deeds give the lot its modern measurements: 100 feet on Baldwin Road, 700 feet on the west, 790 feet on the east along land "formerly of George K. Carter, now of Mears", and 89,400 square feet in all.

In April 1954 the Toothakers sold the place to A. Warren Stearns of Billerica, and in July 1954 Stearns sold it to George and Eva D. Francoeur. The old house was gone by the mid-1950s, and the present house on the lot dates from about 1955. The Francoeurs sold in 1965, and the house, by then "41 Baldwin Road", changed hands again in 1974 and passed within the family of later private owners in 1997.

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.