Boston and Maine Railroad Billerica Shop Complex - Power Plant

The Power Plant at 1000 High Street supplied the Boston and Maine Railroad's Billerica Shops with electricity, compressed air, steam and heat. It is a brick and steel building about 122 by 115 feet, with brick walls on a concrete foundation in a plain Classical Revival style, and it stands on the north side of the locomotive shop yard beyond the Locomotive Blacksmith Shop, north of the Locomotive Repair Shop. It was built with the other shop buildings between 1911 and 1914; the MBTA survey of 1988 dated it about 1912.

The plant sits on land that was farm and woodland for most of the nineteenth century. It lies on Parcel XII of the railroad's purchase plan of April 1911, a strip of 20.2 acres running from Pond Street, then called "the Tewksbury road," north to Cold Brook, which the older deeds call "Fox Brook." The strip was the eastern half of the "Davis lot," which William Bowers bought in August 1831 and of which he sold an undivided half the next day to John and Henry Baldwin. The Bowers half later belonged to his unmarried sisters Priscilla, Mary and Fanny Bowers. By wills of December 9, 1862, Priscilla left the remainder of her property to the Baptist Church in Billerica as a fund for "the support of Preaching in the Baptist Meeting house," and Mary left all of hers "to the Town of Billerica ... for the benefit of the Poor," the bequest that began the town's Bowers Fund. Priscilla died in February 1869 and Mary in 1870.

On June 1, 1871 the town, by a committee of Dudley Foster, Israel A. Colson and David L. Mason, sold its two thirds of the Bowers half to Gideon Gilman of Billerica for $833.33, and the First Baptist Church sold him the other third for $416.67. The same day Gilman mortgaged the half back to the church deacons, Edward Spaulding and George C. Gilman, for $1,250, and sold it to George C. Gilman for $1,300, subject to that mortgage. In 1880 the Baldwin heirs (Annie G. Tucker, Kate G. Parker and the minor Henry Baldwin) petitioned the Superior Court to divide the land, and the commissioners John O. Richardson, Dudley Foster and William H. Patten walked it on June 13, 1881. They set off the western pieces, 20.15 acres from the road "along the stone wall to the centre of Fox Brook" and about 10.4 acres more, to the Baldwin heirs; this became the Swain parcel of 1911, under the Locomotive Repair Shop. Gilman kept the eastern twenty acres, 738 feet on the road and about 2,481 feet deep to the brook, by land of James Chandler on the east.

George C. Gilman died soon after, and in the fall of 1883 the land went to John E. Rowell of Billerica. The deacons assigned him the 1871 mortgage, Gilman's widow Sophia C. Gilman, his daughters Sophia H. Hill and Mary A. Gilman, and Mrs. Gilman as guardian of the minor Laura E. Gilman quitclaimed their shares to him, and on December 4, 1883 he made "open and peaceable entry" on the land to foreclose the mortgage. Rowell held it for twenty-eight years, and on May 1, 1911 he sold it to the Boston and Maine Railroad with his two other parcels for the new shops.

During the 1920s the Boston and Maine had more than thirty power plants on its system, and the Billerica plant was considered the largest and most modern of them. It made electricity for light and shop power, compressed air for the shop tools and steam for the hammers in the blacksmith shop, and it heated the shops with hot water warmed by exhaust steam and circulated through radiator coils. The original equipment included two General Electric 350-kilowatt three-phase generators driven by Rice and Sargent duplex engines, which exhausted into a low-pressure Curtis turbine driving a 750-kilowatt generator, with air compressors, boiler feed, condensate return and fire pumps. Steam came from five Babcock and Wilcox 100-horsepower boilers. In 1947 the original chimney was replaced by a new stack 147 feet high.

The railroad held the shop land until its bankruptcy trustees sold the rail lines to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority in 1976, and the MBTA still owns the lot. By 1988 the plant's services were much reduced: two oil-fired boilers then supplied heat to the locomotive shop and the office building. The building survives, and the 1988 survey judged the shop complex eligible for the National Register.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.302
2. Billerica assessor, 1000 High St (17-2-2): Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, 70.11 acres, deed Book 2226, Page 326 (1976)

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.