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East Billerica

East Billerica is the eastern village of Billerica, the farming and mill neighborhood along Content Brook between Billerica Centre and the Tewksbury and Wilmington lines. Its old center is the place where Gray Street crosses the railroad and Content Brook, at the site of the East Billerica Station and the Richardson saw mill. From there Andover Road, Salem Road (the old Wilmington road), Patten Road, Allen Road and Baldwin Road run out across the plain to the Shawsheen River and to Pattenville, the old mill village at the Tewksbury line, and Gray Street goes on north into Tewksbury as Chandler Street.

The road through it is one of the oldest in town. The country road to Andover crossed Content Brook at Content bridge, and in 1664 the town laid out a highway "from ye country road leading to andever, to Shawshin Riuer, beginning on ye east of content bridge," which Hazen read as "the road from the depot to Pattenville." The Brown family farmed on the Wilmington road from the 1690s at the Brown Family Homestead; the Patten Homestead on Salem Road has framing dated to about 1700; and the Baldwin homestead at Andover Road and Canal Street became Allen's Tavern after Samuel Allen bought the farm in 1762. When Tewksbury was set off in 1734, the old country road north of Content Brook became a Tewksbury way.

The village grew around the saw mill on Content Brook, which William French built about 1764 and which the Richardson family owned from 1778 to 1944. Their house, the Richardson Homestead, stands on Gray Street. Oliver Richardson boarded laborers when the Middlesex Canal was dug past the farm in the 1790s, and in 1883 Hazen wrote of "a saw-mill, now owned by Mr. John O. Richardson, on Content Brook, near the railroad station at East Billerica." The Richardsons also built houses around the Centre, partly as an outlet for the mill's lumber.

The Boston and Lowell Railroad bought its way across the Richardson farm in 1834 and opened in 1835, and by 1841 there was a stop at the Gray Street crossing. Peter B. Bohonan, who built his house beside the crossing in 1845, was the station agent for more than thirty years and, from December 21, 1877, the first postmaster of East Billerica. The railroad built the Railroad House on the station grounds in 1874; it is the last building left from the station.

The school of the east ward was District No. 7, which built a new schoolhouse on Salem Road in 1854, known as the Pattenville School in 1885 and then as the Richardson School. In 1916, with its first six grades down by about half, the School Committee closed the East Billerica District School and carried the children to the Centre, and in 1932 the town sold the building to the East Billerica Community Center, which used it as a community hall; it was taken down in 1974. The town opened the Kennedy School on Kimbrough Road in 1965 and the Locke School on Allen Road in 1968.

Over the twentieth century the farms were divided into house lots, among them Billerica Highlands off Baldwin Road (1913), King's Corner & King's Pines, Shore Acres, Riverview Park, Whipple Acres (1963) and Castlewood East. In 1994 town meeting made the old mill neighborhood on Gray Street a local historic district, the Richardson's Mill Historic District, with twelve properties and nine buildings. The houses around the mill site include the Richardson Homestead, the William Gray House (1846), built by a Tewksbury merchant who married a Richardson daughter, the Colby House that John O. Richardson built about 1843 and the New Symmes House of 1909, with the site of the William Symmes House.

East Billerica

East Billerica

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