Caleb S. Brown House

The Caleb S. Brown House stood on the old road just east of the road from Chelmsford to Bedford (now Nashua Road), in the west part of Billerica north of the District No. 9 school. It was the house of an 80-acre farm on the west side of the Concord River. The 1853 Walling map labels it "C. S. Brown", which is how the house got its name and its 1852 date. The deeds show the farm with "all the Buildings thereon standing" as far back as 1794.

In April 1794 Joseph Nickles, yeoman, sold the farm, "containing by Estimation Eighty acres", to Isaac Barron, gentleman, for 270 pounds. A highway two rods wide already crossed it. Barron lived there until he died in 1820. His will left everything to the children of his son Isaac Barron Jr., who had just died, and his inventory valued "The homestead ... containing by estimation 80 acres, with a dwelling house & barn thereon" at $1,500. The executor, Joel Adams of Chelmsford, auctioned the farm at the house on April 4, 1821, and Samuel Brown of Carlisle, a cooper, bought it for $1,255. The deed reserved "a right of way as the old road runs" and a three-rod way "where the new road is now made". That is the bend of the old road where the 1853 map puts the house.

Samuel Brown 2d also kept a tavern on the neighboring Russell farm, and he ran into debt. In 1825 he mortgaged the Barron farm to Joel Adams. In March 1827 a deputy sheriff sold his equity of redemption at auction at Brown's tavern. That July the buyer, Samuel Tuttle Jr. of Antrim, N.H., sold the farm "with a dwelling house and barn thereon" to Brown's son Caleb S. Brown for $750, and the father released his own remaining right to "my son Caleb Sumner Brown". Caleb, who married Isanna Page of Carlisle in 1828, kept an inn for a few years, in Bedford and on the family tavern farm. He then settled here as a farmer. He gave part of the District No. 9 schoolhouse lot on the Chelmsford-Bedford road in 1852, served as selectman in 1851-1852, and enlarged the farm to about 140 acres. He died in 1877. Mrs. C. S. Brown was still selling gravel and hay to the town in 1888-1890.

In July 1892 surveyor Albert E. Wood drew the "Plan of the Sumner Brown Estate". That month Caleb's children (Otis S. Brown of Cambridge, Aradine Brown of Billerica, and his daughters Harriet Haynes, Eugenie Fletcher, Elizabeth B. Hutchinson and Vivian Adams) sold a lot to Charles P. Comerford. They sold the 140 acres "with the buildings thereon" to Freeman J. Smith of Waltham for $3,325. After Smith died, his widow Catherine M. Smith sold her interest in 1905 to John Ayers and Mary Buckley of Somerville, who sold the farm to Francis P. DeLorey in 1907. In 1911 the guardian of Smith's daughter Helen sold DeLorey her title. DeLorey farmed the land with a Federal Land Bank mortgage. In 1930 he sold the 140 acres "with the buildings thereon" to Edward T. P. Graham of Cambridge.

After a lawsuit over Graham's estate, the land passed to the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Boston. The Town rezoned it from rural residence to industrial in 1969, and in 1977 the Archbishop sold it to New England Nuclear Corporation for $450,000. It became part of the company's Treble Cove Road campus and passed with it to E. I. du Pont de Nemours (by merger, 1984), the Du Pont Merck Pharmaceutical Company (1991), Bristol-Myers Squibb (2001) and ACP Lantern Real Estate (2008). In 2013 about 127 acres, described in the deed as "vacant land", were sold to Bedford Woods Development, which laid out the Sumner Farms subdivision; the old Brown house was gone by then. A new house was built on its Lot 27, 5 Hemlock Lane, in 2017.

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.