Benjamin L. Judkins House (Middlesex Turnpike)

The Benjamin L. Judkins House was the farmhouse of a small 25-acre farm on the west side of the road that became the Middlesex Turnpike, in the stretch between Jaquith's and the Charles Stearns place near Nuttings Lake. The 1853 map label "J. Buttman" is for Jonathan Butman Jr., who owned the farm from 1850 to 1858. The deeds show that the house is older than its traditional date of 1852: the farm already had "all the Buildings thereon standing" when Benjamin L. Judkins sold it in 1844. Every deed for the next hundred years describes it the same way, starting "at a bridle way by the ten acre pasture, so called, at the Easterly angle" and running by walls along the lands of Judkins, George Bacon, Seth Crosby and the Stearns family, always "reserving a right for George Bacon to pass and repass through said land in the usual way".

Judkins had put the farm together from "land I bought of Joseph Parker & Joshua Simonds" and sold it in February 1844 to Ira N. Hannaford. In June 1850 Hannaford sold it for $1,500 to Jonathan Butman Jr., a yeoman from Lowell. Butman moved onto the place and mortgaged it in 1855. In April 1858 he and his wife Amey W. Butman sold it for $1,530 to Alexander Howes of Beverly, who gave back a mortgage for part of the price. Two years later Howes, by then "of Billerica", sold "my homestead farm" to his relatives Willis Howes of Boston and Cyrus Howes of Dennis. That deed is the one that places the farm "easterly on the town road leading from Mr. Jaquith's to Charles Stearns".

The Howeses sold in 1861 to William E. Clark of Chelsea. In 1863 Clark, by then living in Worcester, mortgaged the farm for $2,000 to the estate of Nicholas Little of Boston, and the buildings had to be insured for at least $950. He defaulted, and in September 1868 the estate's administrator, Charles S. Lincoln, sold the farm at auction in Billerica for $1,050 to Roscoe P. Owen of Boston. Within three weeks Owen resold it for $1,200 to Dennis O'Keefe of Bedford.

The O'Keefe family kept the farm for more than sixty years. In 1883 Dennis O'Keefe bought one more acre from Samuel Cole, on the Turnpike south of the farm "to an old wall at land of the late Charles Stearns". The farm passed under his will to Mary Frances O'Keefe. After her death her executrix, Ellen F. Gowans of Arlington, sold the farm and the acre "with the buildings thereon" in April 1930 for $6,000 to Margaret A. Barber of Littleton. In 1947 she passed them to Esther L. Barber. By then the Bedford-Billerica branch of the Boston and Maine Railroad had cut across the old farm. When Esther Barber sold in 1953, the deed left out everything on the far side of the tracks.

In 1956 the strip between the railroad and the Turnpike was surveyed, and a 29,000-square-foot lot was sold in February 1957 to Turnpike Acres, Inc. The lot has 125 feet of frontage on the Turnpike, runs back to the railroad, and abuts land of Frederick P. Morris on the north (Plan 88-132A). The old farmhouse is recorded as taken down in 1961, and the Cape-style house that now stands at 437 Middlesex Turnpike went up about 1962. Turnpike Acres sold the lot in 1965, and since then it has been bought and sold by private owners.

References

1. Billerica assessor, 437 Middlesex Tp, parcel 78-200-0, 0.666 acres, Plan 88-132A

Deed References Expand all

Recorded is Book/Page at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds unless noted.