Everett W. Livingston

East Billerica Postmaster
In Office	1889 - 1893
Preceded by	Peter B. Bohonan
Succeeded by	William F. Symmes
Surveyor of Wood and Lumber
In Office	1894 - 1899
Constable
In Office	1894 - 1912
Fish and Game Warden
In Office	1895 - 1897
Fire Engineer
In Office	1896 - 1900
Field Driver
In Office	1907 - 1915

Everett W. Livingston was one of Billerica's two police officers around the turn of the twentieth century, a town constable from 1894 until 1912, and for a time the East Billerica postmaster. His name is on the list of the town's voters in 1880 printed in Hazen's History of Billerica, and a modern account of the Foster murder of 1894 gives his full name as Everett Whitton Livingston and places his home on Pond Street. The Official Register of the United States lists E. W. Livingston as postmaster at East Billerica in 1889 and 1891. In the same years the town paid him for breaking roads in winter and for gravel, lumber and hay, and it paid him for making cider in 1892; in 1906 a payment for cider making went to E. W. Livingston and Son.

Town meeting first elected him constable in 1894, with Martin Conway Jr., and within months he was at the center of what the selectmen called "the worst affair that has happened in Town for many years." Around midnight on September 11, 1894, three Burlington men woke him at home to report a highway robbery, and during the attempt to arrest the robbers on Lexington Road one of the three, Leroy S. Foster of Burlington, was shot dead. Livingston ran after the fleeing wagon, enlisted George B. Smith and James E. Coulter in Billerica Centre, and kept up the chase through the night; the next day his clues led him and Selectman Edward B. Haskell to the wagon in a Somerville stable yard, and three Somerville men were arrested and later sentenced to life imprisonment. The selectmen wrote in their next report: "Much praise is due to Constable Everett W. Livingston for his courage at the time, and for his perseverance in the pursuit which finally led to the arrest of the three assassins."

He held many smaller posts at the same time. He was a surveyor of wood and lumber, the town's fish warden in the mid-1890s, and one of the Engineers of the Fire Department from 1896 to 1900; in 1895 town meeting named him, with the Board of Engineers, to spend $500 finishing the part of the town stable used by the fire department. He was also paid as janitor of the Town Hall, collected the rent for its use, and served as truant officer for Precinct 1 and as a keeper of the lock-up.

By the late 1890s he and Martin Conway were the town's two police officers, each paid $730 a year, and they signed the annual police and truant officers' reports together. From 1907 he was also chosen a field driver, and at the town meetings of 1909 and 1910 it was he who moved to dispense with the reading of the warrant and to open the polls. At the election of 1912 the town chose Martin Conway and Henry D. Livingston as its constables, ending Everett's eighteen years in the office. The town reports do not record his death, and they do not say how he was related to Henry D. Livingston, who went on to become the town's Chief of Police.

Everett W. Livingston

Everett W. Livingston

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