Charles E. Hosmer House

The Charles E. Hosmer House stands on the east side of Concord Road in South Billerica, on a lot of about four acres that runs back from the road to the old Bedford and Billerica branch of the Boston and Maine Railroad, a short way south of the South Billerica Station. The town's assessor dates the house to about 1855, but the deeds show that it is a generation younger: when Dr. Charles E. Hosmer bought the land in 1892 it was "a certain pasture lot" with no buildings on it.

The pasture was part of the old farm on the Bedford line that is traced on the Samuel Stearns House page. The land east of the road came to Sampson Spaulding from the Hutchinson heirs in 1815, and after his death passed with the farm through John Skinner (1849), Royal T. Bryant (1852), Josiah B. Gleason and Sarah H. Bryant (1865-1866), John A. Merriam, William G. Taylor, Abel S. Farwell (1876) and Thomas and William Wilson (1877) to Harriet A. Edwards, who conveyed it in 1887 to Mary A. Pardee, wife of J. N. Pardee. The lot to the north, the Rhoda Kemp House corner, was still described in 1892 as bounded "on land late of Sampson Spaulding".

On September 12, 1892, the Pardees sold Charles E. Hosmer of Billerica, "physician", for $300, the pasture between the "road leading from Billerica to Bedford" and the railroad: about 408 feet on the road, 475 feet along the stone wall on Mrs. Pardee's land to the south, 525 feet on the railroad and 342 feet on A. W. Albert Lakeman's land to the north. Mrs. Pardee kept a lane ten feet wide to "a cattle pass under said railroad" for as long as she owned land east of the tracks. Dr. Hosmer had practised in Billerica since 1874, served on the school committee and the board of health, and helped Henry A. Hazen with the map of ancient Billerica for his 1883 history. He built his house on the new lot, and it was his home for the rest of his life.

In 1907 the doctor deeded the southern 80-foot strip of the lot to Mary A. Hosmer, and in 1908 he mortgaged the homestead to the Middlesex Institution for Savings of Concord. In February 1915 he and the bank gave up their rights in the cattle pass, which crossed under the tracks "about seven hundred twenty-five (725) feet southerly of the South Billerica Station building", and that March the county took a strip of the front for the straightening of Concord Road. Dr. Hosmer died on April 8, 1929, aged 91. In May 1930 his heirs, Mary A. Hosmer, Victor J. Hosmer, Alice Amy Torrey and Helen R. Hosmer, deeded "the homestead estate of the late Dr. Charles E. Hosmer" to the remaining heir, Maurice W. Hosmer of Scituate, "to vest in the grantee the sole ownership thereof", and Mary A. Hosmer added the south strip two days later.

Maurice Hosmer mortgaged the place to his sister Alice Amy Torrey in 1932 and deeded it to her in 1935, still described as "the homestead estate recently occupied by Dr. Charles E. Hosmer". She sold it in 1939 to John E. Brassil of Belmont, who sold it in 1943 to Mary C. Wilson of Boston. In 1948 Mrs. Wilson sold the two parcels "with the buildings thereon" to Vincenzo and Maria Calvaresi of Concord. The Calvaresis placed the property in the Vincenzo Calvaresi Trust in 1962, and in 1966 had a lot of 30,014 square feet at the south end of the frontage surveyed off (Plan Book 103, Plan 171B). The trust sold the rest of the property to private owners in 1969; they bought the south lot back in 1971 and sold the whole in 1981. The house is a two-family dwelling today, with a barn converted to a building on the lot.

References

1. Billerica assessor, 388 Concord Rd (parcel 94-19-2): 4.174 acres, two-family old style house, barn/loft building
2. Hazen (1883): Dr. Charles E. Hosmer, physician from 1874, aided the Map of Ancient Billerica

Deed References Expand all

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