Boston and Maine Railroad Billerica Shop Complex - Dry Lumber Storage

The Dry Lumber Storage shed at 600 High Street is one of the original buildings of the Boston and Maine Railroad's Billerica Shops, the railroad's central plant for the heavy repair of locomotives and passenger cars, built from 1911 to 1914. It is a long one-story wood-frame shed on the passenger car side of the shop yard, northeast of the passenger car and paint shops, beside the Dry Kiln, and it held the lumber that the kiln dried. The railroad's list of its Billerica property for 1925, printed in the town report of 1928, valued the "Lumber Shed" at $16,655 and the "Dry Kiln" at $17,555.

The shed stands on the farm of the Rev. Elias Nason, the minister, author and lecturer who settled in North Billerica in 1865. In April of that year Brooks T. Batcheller of Boston sold him, for $2,300, forty acres "with the buildings thereon" on the easterly side of the road from the meetinghouse to the north of the Concord River (now High Street), bounded by Fox's Brook, as it was then called (the Cold Brook of the 1911 plan), and by the Middlesex Canal, land that Joseph Batcheller had bought from Nathan Mears in 1813. Nason died on June 17, 1887 and left the farm to his widow, Mira Ann Nason. In 1888 she conveyed it, with a strip along the old canal, to their son Charles P. H. Nason of Germantown, Philadelphia, by a conditional deed securing $1,500, and in 1899 his brothers and sisters quitclaimed their interests to him for $1,925.

Charles P. H. Nason, then living in Philadelphia, signed his deed to the railroad at Grenoble, France, on June 10, 1911. It conveyed about 39 acres "with the buildings thereon," Parcel IV on the railroad's purchase plan of April 1911, running from High Street to the center of the old canal and to Cold Brook, and reserved to him the barn for six months. The house and barn were still on the railroad's land in 1925, when its list valued the "Nason House," "Nason Barn" and "Nason Poultry House" at $1,165, $290 and $95.

The railroad sold the passenger car shops to the Johns-Manville company in 1944 and later sold more of the land near them. In March 1954 the Boston and Maine sold a strip of 610,000 square feet (about fourteen acres) beside the land of the Johns-Manville Products Corporation, which then owned the passenger car shops, with the right to use the shop roadway to High Street; the railroad kept its lead tracks across the lot. The strip, which held the kiln, the lumber shed and the newer shipping office, was resold the same day, and in 1962 it passed to Eastern Terminals, Inc., a Massachusetts company of Cambridge. The assessors later recorded small mill buildings of the George McQuesten Company on the lot, and the McQuesten Group and Hood Industries had businesses in the shed between 2008 and 2012.

In September 2016 the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority took the lot by eminent domain from Eastern Terminals, with an adjoining parcel at 800 High Street, "for the purpose of railroad operations and other transportation purposes." The MBTA owns it today, and in the early 2020s it began building a dispatching center for its northside commuter rail lines at 600 High Street.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.376
2. Annual Report 1928: the railroad's 1925 list of its Billerica property: Lumber Shed $16,655, Dry Kiln $17,555, Nason house, barn and poultry house
3. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), Genealogical Register: the Rev. Elias Nason, of North Billerica from 1865, and his children, among them Charles Pinckney Holbrook Nason
4. Billerica assessor, 600 High St (17-1-1): MBTA, 15.08 acres, office building about 1940, small mill buildings of Geo. McQuesten Co.
5. Fenagh Engineering: MBTA Iron Horse Park, 600 High Street, dispatching building for the northside commuter rail

Deed References Expand all

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