Billerica Garden Suburb and the Growth of Pinehurst

Type	Development
Date	June 14, 1914

The years after the Boston and Maine Railroad chose North Billerica for its repair shops were the fastest growth Billerica had known. The town had 2,789 people at the federal census of 1910, 3,246 at the state census of 1915, 3,646 in 1920 and 5,880 in 1930. The growth came in two very different places. In North Billerica, beside the new shops (see Opening of the Boston and Maine Shops), the Rev. Charles H. Williams organized the Billerica Garden Suburb, a planned village of workmen's houses on the English garden city model. In the south of the town, along Boston Road near the Burlington line, the small house lots laid out around the Pinehurst trolley park filled first with summer camps and then with families who lived there all year, and by the 1920s the Pinehurst district was the fastest growing part of the town, asking for its own school, water mains, police and fire protection.

The Billerica Board of Trade, of which Williams was president, had been told in 1912 to expect 3,000 shop employees and perhaps 15,000 new residents, and it wanted to keep the overcrowding of the mill cities out of Billerica. Billerica Garden Suburb, Inc. was incorporated on June 14, 1914. It joined a limited-dividend company with a partnership of the workers who would live in its houses, on the plan of the English co-partnership tenant societies, and was meant for men earning from $12 to $20 a week. The land was 26.05 acres of Williams's own between the Concord River, the Boston and Lowell Railroad and the Faulkner Manufacturing Company, surveyed by Smith and Brooks of Lowell in June 1914 and recorded on July 7, 1914 (Plan Book 31, Plan 82). The planner Arthur C. Comey drew the layout, with Warren H. Manning as advisory landscape architect, and the streets were named for the English garden villages the company copied: Letchworth Avenue, Hampstead Avenue, Port Sunlight Road, Brentham Road and Ilford Road, entered by Mason Avenue, with Indian Road along the river, which became Indian Knoll Road in the Street Renaming of 1988-1991.

The town supplied the water and, in time, took over the streets. At the annual meeting of 1914, on Williams's motion, the town voted to borrow $2,000 "for the purpose of extending the water mains on the property of the Billerica Garden Suburb, Inc.," in notes payable in 1915 and 1916; the water commissioners carried the "Billerica Garden Suburbs" extension on their books at $1,537.35 that year, $2,059.55 by 1915 and $5,427.15 by 1922. The warrant of 1916 asked the town to accept Letchworth Avenue, Mason Avenue, Indian Road, Brentham Road, Port Sunlight Road and Ilford Road, and the meeting voted, on Williams's motion, that they be accepted "when satisfactory to the Board of Selectmen." The next year's warrant asked $3,000 for more mains in the suburb and street lights on Brentham Road and Mason Avenue, and in 1920 the town voted to accept and allow the laying out of the suburb's streets, Hampstead Avenue among them, and to spend $2,000 on water main extensions "in the section of the Town known as Billerica Garden Suburbs." The company built with its own day labor and had about seventy houses up by 1917. It appears in the directories from 1917 to 1931 as a real estate firm and contractors and builders at 4 Carleton Street, North Billerica, with Williams as its president, treasurer and general manager. A house it owned, occupied by Piere Moran, caught fire from a chimney spark on January 29, 1919. In 1926 the town appropriated $1,000 for the drainage of the Garden Suburb, and on April 22, 1927 the company, by Williams as treasurer and general manager, gave the town the right to enter its land to drain Mason Avenue. In 1929 the town voted $150 for a fire alarm box in "the Billerica Garden Suburbs section," and Box 117 was put up there by the permanent firemen.

The suburb never reached the size its founders planned. The shop employment of 1914 was far below the 3,000 men forecast, and the Historical Commission's survey of 7 Brentham Road blames the railroad shopmen's strike of 1922, which bred "ill feelings among the railroad workers living in the Garden Suburbs," and later the Great Depression for leaving the plan unfinished. About forty of the early houses can still be identified. In 2005 the American Planning Association named the Billerica Garden Suburb a National Planning Landmark as "the first attempt in the United States to provide affordable homeownership to workers employing the European garden city model," and the award was presented to the selectmen, through their chairman Michael S. Rosa, in 2006.

Pinehurst grew from below, lot by lot. The name came from Pinehurst Park, the trolley park opened in 1901 on Boston Road at Cook Street, and around it promoters cut farms and woods into lots mostly 25 feet wide: E. E. Varnum's Pinehurst Annex of 1902, Pinedale Park of 1908, Frank W. Coughlin's Pinehurst Manor of 1910, with well over a thousand lots, and his The Pines of 1912 on the Shawsheen River, and Bernard F. McHugh's Park View of 1917 (see Pinehurst Manor & Park View). The streets were private ways, and most of the first buildings were summer camps. In 1915 the town's committee on building by-laws held a hearing at the request of the Pinehurst Improvement Association in the pavilion at Pinehurst Park, lent by J. Joseph McHugh; more than 100 people came, "representing all the districts in this section, which has a summer population of between four thousand and five thousand people." That summer a special town meeting voted $100 for fire extinguishers for the Pinehurst Improvement Association's district, and the selectmen bought twelve, marked "Property of the Town of Billerica." Fire alarm Box 32 covered the "Vicinity Pinehurst." In 1916 two special police officers were kept on duty in the Pinehurst district through the summer, and on May 20, 1918 the "big Pinehurst fire" brought a pumping engine from Woburn, two from Lexington and one from Bedford to help the town's department.

As the camps became year-round homes the district pressed the town for services, and the town answered slowly. In 1919 a committee on extending the water main about a mile along Boston Road to the Burlington line reported that it would cost about $10,000, not counting side streets, for no more than fifteen water takers, and called it "too large an amount to expend at the present time." The children went to school at the Centre by a special trolley car and, after the Woburn car line was suspended in June 1921, by buses carrying "the one hundred and thirty Pinehurst and the sixty East Billerica pupils." In 1921 a committee under Philip Scott counted 58 Pinehurst children in the first six grades being carried to the Centre and bought a lot "on the southerly side of Boston Road, just west of the Shawsheen post office," from Josiah Hardwick for $800. The Pinehurst School, built on a $15,000 appropriation, opened in January 1923 with 85 pupils in grades one to four, among its first teachers Mary E. Gill. The police reported "moonshine liquor" to be most prevalent "in the Pinehurst district" in 1922 and gave the section weekend patrols at its citizens' request. In 1924 the town voted water mains on Pinehurst and Glenside Avenues, about 1,200 feet, and accepted Pinehurst Avenue as a town way from Boston Road to Glenvale Avenue.

By 1927 the Pinehurst School, with desks for 84, had 104 pupils, the overflow taught in a hired hall, and a special town meeting on June 1, 1927 voted $5,000 for two portable schoolhouses, one at Pinehurst. The school building committee of Maurice A. Buck, Edgar P. Sellew and others warned that "the very rapid growth of the school population of the Pinehurst district" would soon outrun portables and that the district "must have a six room brick school within its area before long." The state's school survey of 1929 told the town that "the Pinehurst section" had "experienced rapid growth in population" and that sixty-five fifth and sixth graders were still being carried to the Centre. In 1930 the town bought the rest of the Hardwick land around the school, 93,658 square feet, for $7,000, and in 1931 a six-room brick school opened beside the wooden one, "all fully occupied" in its first year. In 1935 the town meeting voted to name it the Thomas Ditson School (Old Ditson School), for Thomas Ditson Jr. of the Ditson Affair and the Alarm of 1775. The same meeting refused a fire station for the section, defeating a motion for $500 for a lot, $1,500 for a building and $2,600 for an engine. In September 1937 the Bennett Public Library Association opened a branch library in Pinehurst, which the town kept open two days a week with an added $1,000 a year, and that fall the Ditson School had 340 pupils and had to reopen the portable.

The two developments left lasting marks of different kinds. The Garden Suburb remains a compact neighborhood of small houses on its curving English-named streets between Faulkner Street and the river. Pinehurst's grid of 40-foot avenues was accepted by the town piece by piece over half a century, Cardington Avenue in 1927 and Ridgeway Avenue not until 1975, and the old Ditson School lot is now the Pinehurst Playground.

People

Charles H. Williams: Founder and treasurer and general manager of Billerica Garden Suburb, Inc. (1914), who moved the town votes for its water mains and streets.
Warren H. Manning: Advisory landscape architect for the Billerica Garden Suburb plan of 1914.
Frank W. Coughlin: Promoter who laid out Pinehurst Manor (1910) and The Pines (1912), the largest of the Pinehurst lot subdivisions.
Philip Scott: Chairman of the 1921 committee that bought the Hardwick lot and planned the Pinehurst School.
Mary E. Gill: One of the two first teachers of the Pinehurst School when it opened in January 1923.
Maurice A. Buck: Member of the 1927 school building committee that reported the rapid growth of the Pinehurst school population.
Edgar P. Sellew: Member of the 1927 school building committee; gave the flagstaff for the Pinehurst School.
Michael S. Rosa: Chairman of the selectmen who received the 2005 National Planning Landmark award for the Garden Suburb in 2006.

Billerica Garden Suburb and the Growth of Pinehurst

Billerica Garden Suburb and the Growth of Pinehurst

People

References