Allen's Tavern

Allen's Tavern stands in East Billerica at the corner of Andover Road and Canal Street (the old road toward Salem), beside the line of the Middlesex Canal. The deeds trace the place to the Baldwin family. Ensign Thomas Baldwin was gathering land on Content Brook and Content Plain by 1704, when his father-in-law Jacob French gave him and his wife Sarah a meadow "on Content Brooke" and twenty-five acres of upland "lying on Content plaine." Thomas made his will in 1745, leaving his widow "the East End of my dwelling house" and giving his son David Baldwin "my Homestead and all my Buildings there on standing"; it was proved in February 1748. The oldest part of the present house is usually dated about 1740, when David, married in 1737, was living on the family farm.

On Nov. 17, 1762 David Baldwin and his wife Keziah sold to Samuel Allen of Gloucester, a former merchant of Newbury and Manchester, "one certain Messuage and Tract of Land with a Mansion House a Barn and out Houses thereon containing one Hundred and forty seven Acres," with fifty more acres on the Andover Road, for 573 pounds, "the Mansion House being where I now reside." (The deed was recorded in 1764, and earlier accounts date the sale 1763.) Allen gave Baldwin a mortgage back the same day for the unpaid price, refinanced it in 1767 with a mortgage to Francis Foxcroft of Cambridge that names "the House" on its quarter acre by the road, and began dividing the farm among his sons: ten acres beside the house to Thomas in 1766, and in January 1775 the land south of the road in two halves, Thomas taking one with "my back Kitchen upon his removing it" and Jeremiah the other with "the West End of my dwelling house and all the Barn." Samuel Allen's will, made in February 1775 and proved that March, left his widow Hannah the east part of the house for her widowhood and then gave Jeremiah Allen "the Easterly Part of the Dwelling House together with the Remainder of the Land on the East Side of the Country Road."

Jeremiah Allen, who married Abigail Rogers in 1776, kept the house as a tavern for sixty years. It stood on the road from Salem toward Amherst, New Hampshire, and after 1803 the canal ran behind it. By tradition the tavern did a thriving business in the canal's best years. Jeremiah was said to weigh 400 pounds, and a pair of slippers attributed to him at the Billerica Historical Society bears out the story. On May 18, 1832 he deeded his son Henry Allen "all my lands in Billerica & Tewksbury with all the buildings thereon," beginning "at the gravel hill at the highway" and running "to the East part of the barn at the road," with forty acres across the canal toward the new railroad; the deed was not recorded until 1841. After Jeremiah's death in October 1837 his other children quitclaimed their shares to Henry (1838), and the last, Americus Allen of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, followed in 1839. The statement in earlier accounts that Jeremiah sold half the place to a son "Charles H." in 1830 comes from an index line for a different Allen family's land in Tewksbury.

Joseph Bancroft surveyed Henry Allen's farm in February 1844: the Canal Lot on the Andover road running back to the Lowell Railroad, the Content Lot and the South Lot, 53 acres in all. Henry made his will in March 1864, leaving his widow Eliza the use of the land for life, and it was proved that August. In December 1867 the widow and heirs quitclaimed the farm "and the buildings thereon" to his son-in-law Thomas P. Eames, who sold it in 1868 to John S. Loring; Loring's widow Joann sold it on Sept. 9, 1874 for $2,800 to Samuel H. King, a deacon of the Congregational church, who borrowed $1,600 of the price from the Orthodox Congregational Society on the same day and paid it off in 1887. King added the three-acre Content meadow behind the house in 1878, and Hazen in 1883 called the place Deacon King's. The corner took his name.

King's will was proved in June 1904, and in June 1906 his executor, Herbert A. King, sold the twenty-five-acre Canal Lot "with the buildings thereon" to Thomas Whooley of Boston. Whooley sold it in 1911 to Samuel, Abraham and Benjamin Fearer of Stoneham, who sold it in 1913 to Libbie Herbert, and in February 1914 she and her husband Ellis conveyed it, with "a thousand gallon tank boiler and a gasoline engine located in the dwelling house," to Barnet M. Hein of Boston. Hein had the land laid out that year as the house lots of "King's Corners," and on Feb. 27, 1915 he sold Lot 34, "a certain parcel of land with the buildings thereon ... at the junction of Canal street and Andover Road," 32,595 square feet, to John C. Currie of Cambridge and Benjamin W. Leavitt of Quebec. A strip of the lot was taken when the county relocated Andover Street in 1916. The Currie and Leavitt families held the old house for more than forty years; in April 1958 their estates and heirs sold it to private owners. Since 1987 it has been held in a family realty trust. The house, enlarged over the years and now a multi-family dwelling, lies within the Middlesex Canal Historic and Archaeological District, listed in the National Register in 1972.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.148
2. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883): the Allen family, Deacon Samuel H. King, and the canal and stage era
3. Middlesex probate 26333: will of Henry Allen of Billerica, 1864
4. Will of Thomas Baldwin, 1745/1748 (Middlesex probate 868)
5. Will of Samuel Allen, 1775 (Middlesex probate 355)

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.