Daniel Hartford House

The Daniel Hartford House stands on the west side of Nashua Road near its corner with the old Rangeway (the road toward Carlisle), in the northwest part of Billerica. The land was part of the farm of Benoni Spaulding, who died in 1839 and whose children divided his lands in the following years.

Daniel Hartford, a stone cutter from Dover, New Hampshire, married Harriet Brown, a granddaughter of Benoni Spaulding, in 1837. In 1850 he and Rodney Brown bought half of a 35-acre pasture on the Rangeway from the assignees of Jacob Spaulding's creditors. On 8 January 1855 Hartford traded his share of that pasture to his mother-in-law, Lydia Brown, wife of Jonas Brown, and in return she and her husband sold him for $300 "a certain tract of Wood-land situate in said Billerica on the Westerly side of the New road, so called, containing seven acres and twenty five rods", running 55 rods north along the new road from the Rangeway to the land of Edward Spalding and back to the land of Joseph Cowdry. The new road was the road from Chelmsford to Bedford, now Nashua Road. Hartford mortgaged the lot to Asa Hill Jr. in 1857 and sold it on 2 April 1858 for $500 to Sarah Jenkins, wife of Samuel Jenkins of Bradford. None of these deeds mentions a building.

The next records date from 1870-71, when the heirs of "Sarah Brown, late of Billerica", a large family of Spauldings, Skinners and others, released to Rodney Brown their rights in ten acres on the Bedford road "with a house & barn thereon", and the surviving children of Benoni Spaulding gave up their claims to the same eight acres "with all the buildings thereon standing". The house was therefore built between 1858 and 1870, most likely for Sarah Jenkins, who seems to have been the Sarah Brown of the 1870 deed. On 25 March 1872 Rodney Brown sold the house and eight acres for $2,000 to Daniel N. Duren, whose name appears on the 1875 and 1889 maps.

Duren had given Brown a mortgage, and in 1895 its assignee, Gertrude S. Kimball of Lowell, advertised the place in the Lowell Daily Courier and sold it at auction on the premises on 23 October 1895. The buyer of record, Frederick P. Marble of Lowell, conveyed it the same week to George Nichols of Carlisle. By the 1970s the Carey family owned the house and almost nine acres. In 1977 they sold the northern 3.9 acres, "known as 33 Nashua Road", with its buildings, and since then the property has been in private hands.

The inventory form says Hartford bought the land in 1855 and suggests the house was already standing on the 1853 map. The deeds show that the 1855 purchase was woodland, that Hartford sold the lot in 1858 still without buildings, and that the house appears in the records only in 1870, so the name records the first owner of the lot rather than the builder.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.205
2. Billerica assessor, 33 Nashua Rd (parcel 46-1-3): part of 46-1-1, divided in 1989

Deed References Expand all

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