Dolly Brook

Dolly Brook is a brook in western Billerica that drains the swamps along Rangeway Road south toward Winning Pond. It runs past Dolly Brook Circle in the Simonds Farm subdivision and through the wetland beside Fieldstone Lane, and then between the Simonds Farm house lots and the land along Nashua Road into the pond, whose outlet carries its water east to the Concord River. Present maps label its lower course into the pond Winning Brook; that name belonged in the old records to the brook running out of the pond (see Winning Brook).

The origin of the name is not recorded, and it does not appear in the town reports before the 1970s. In May 1972 the town's consulting engineers, Camp, Dresser and McKee, recommended a water storage reservoir in the Dolly Brook watershed, to hold water that could be released into the Concord River, the source of the town's water supply, at times of low flow. In 1973 Town Meeting voted $15,000 for a preliminary study of the land to be taken. In 1974 an article to spend $1,400,000 on land on Assessors' Plates 38, 47, 48, 57 and 58 was referred instead to a committee to study "acquiring from the Middlesex County Commissioners the land they have declared surplus in the area adjoining Winning Pond for the purpose of building a reservoir and for recreational purpose." The Dolly Brook Reservoir Committee, with Arthur L. Doyle of the Planning Board as chairman and Ralph R. Bacon of the Water Committee as secretary, first met on October 15, 1974 and set out to review "various options available to supplement water flow to the Concord River at periods of low flow, including Dolly Brook Reservoir, water from the Merrimack River and any other feasible alternatives."

In 1975 the meeting defeated the $1,400,000 appropriation by a rising vote of 10 to 94. The committee then asked to buy the land over three years, warning that "industry will move in on this land soon, if we do not start to act on this project this year," and the town's engineers built a model of the reservoir site. In 1976 a motion to borrow $500,000 for the land failed, 25 in favor and 77 against, short of the two thirds needed, and the meeting dismissed the committee "with thanks." The county land beside Winning Pond became Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park instead.

Houses came to the upper brook in the 1990s. The revised Simonds Farm plan of 1996 (Plan Book 192, Plan 56) laid out Dolly Brook Circle beside the swamp the brook drains, and the town accepted the subdivision streets in 2010. In 2009 Town Meeting, by 112 to 54, rezoned from industrial to rural residence a tract of about 43 acres northeast of Nashua Road, between the road and the Simonds Farm subdivision, described as "generally bounded to the east by Dolly Brook." The brook still runs through woods and swamp for most of its length.

Dolly Brook

Dolly Brook

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