Fletcher Hotel

The Fletcher Hotel stood at the southeast corner of the two oldest roads in Billerica Center, Boston Road (once "Long Street" and "the great road") and Andover Road (once "East Street" and "Sheldon's Lane"), directly across from the meetinghouse on the Billerica Common. Its land was the northwest corner of the thirty-acre homestead that the trader Oliver Abbot bought of Joshua Abbot in 1757, bounded "westwardly by said highway to the highway called long street" and north by "the highway called East Street".

In September 1795 Oliver Abbot sold Charles Hammock and Ephraim Kidder Jr. "half an acre & one pole" at the corner of Long Street and "East street or Sheldons lane", with no buildings, for 60 pounds. Abbot died a few months later; his 1796 inventory describes the rest of the homestead around the corner. The partners put up a large building, the one seen in the old woodcut of Billerica Center. By April 1797 Hammock had dropped out, and Kidder alone sold the lot "with the buildings thereon standing" to the trader James Abbott for $800. When the town took down the old meetinghouse that year, it set its new Town House on a corner of this lot: Abbot's 1798 deed to Dr. William Wilkins excepted "the south west corner", 40 feet on the road and 42 feet deep, and Wilkins's 1799 mortgage calls it "a town house lot".

Dr. Wilkins lived in "a dwelling house" here, but he and his partners Henry Cummings and Lewis Gould were declared bankrupt in 1803, and the assignee, Joseph Locke, sold James Abbot the equity in "the dwelling house thereon standing directly in front of the meeting house, being the same where the said Wilkins now lives". In December 1809 Abbot sold the house for $2,600 to Dr. Joseph Foster, a physician, who died the next year. His father released the estate to the widow, Lucy Foster, who cut a quarter acre off the east end along the Salem road in 1814 and in November 1817 sold the rest, called "two and an half acres", to William Richardson for $2,500.

Richardson made it a tavern and stage stand. He mortgaged it in 1819 to his brother Asa Richardson, a Boston merchant, for $4,000, and when he died in 1826 his inventory listed ten horses, "Four Stage Harnesses", "1 Old Stage Coach", decanters and "33 Wine Glasses", but no real estate. Asa held the property under the mortgage and in 1833 sold it as "a Tavern stand" in front of the first Congregational meetinghouse to Lyman Haynes, innholder. Haynes sold it to Sereno Fisk in 1839, took it back in 1840, sold house lots off the east end along the Salem road, and in 1849 sold the tavern stand, now one acre, to Artemas Hill for $3,900.

Hill, an innholder, sold the tavern in February 1853 to Charles G. Fletcher of Carlisle, and the 1853 map shows it as "C. Fletcher's Hotel". Fletcher kept it only seven months: in September 1853 he and William Hardy exchanged properties, Fletcher taking Hardy's house down Boston Road (the Nathaniel Davidson House) and Hardy taking the tavern stand for $3,500. Hardy sold "the Homestead land & estate owned & occupied by us" to Henry Sperry in 1855, and Sperry sold it in 1856 to William Blanchard, who paid off the mortgages by 1866. In 1867 Blanchard sold the "Tavern Stand" to Joseph Warren Green, whose name is on the hotel in the 1875 atlas. Green's 1876 mortgage describes "about one acre ... with the Hotel building and Cottage house thereon".

On October 4, 1877 fire destroyed the hotel and the G.A.R. Hall in the old Town House next door. Twelve days later Green bought the burnt Town House lot, 42 by 40 feet, from Jasper F. Bruce, joining it to the corner, but in 1879 he gave the whole to his mortgagee, Albert R. Richardson. In 1880 Richardson sold it, with "the large street lantern at the corner of the house", to Mary Hanson Mitchell, whose husband, Moses Campbell Mitchell, moved his boys' school here (see Mitchell Boys' School). The school burned in 1888, and that August the Mitchells sold the bare corner to Dr. Albert C. Lane, who built the house later moved to Andover Road (see Dr. Albert C. Lane House). Lane sold it in 1892 for $8,000 to Eliphalet W. Tyler of New York; it passed in 1905 to Dr. John Bennett Tyler and in 1907 to his wife Jennie, who sold it in 1916, after his death, to J. Edward Allen.

The lot was divided after Allen's death. In 1922 his executrix sold the south 44 feet, with the block of stores built about 1915, to the Norton family of Lowell (plan for James J. Norton, Plan Book 41, Plan 78), and in 1924 E. Viola Allen sold the corner, 30,507 square feet, to Gray Realty Company, the property arm of the E. E. Gray grocery chain (Plan Book 45, Plan 40), which moved the Lane house back to face Andover Road and built the north block of the Billerica Center Shops. Frank Cohen bought the Norton lot in March 1946 and the Gray corner in November 1946, reuniting the old hotel lot, and put it into Billerica Associates, Inc., which joined the two blocks. In 1961 Billerica Associates sold the property for $80,000 to Henry J. McCormack, the druggist who had leased the corner store since 1947. He divided it that December into Lots A and B (Plan Book 97, Plan 42) and sold both in 1975. After a family transfer in 1987, the property was sold in 1998 to MAD Realty Trust, which still owns the shops at 420-428 Boston Road.

Earlier accounts of the building, including an earlier version of this page, trace it from 1805 to 1816 through deeds from James Abbot to John Phillips, Phillips to Michael Parker, the Parkers to Joseph Bradley, Bradley to Joseph Parker, and Parker to William Richardson. Those deeds describe a small store lot on the north side of Sheldon's Lane, bounded south by the lane. The hotel corner went instead from Abbot to Dr. Wilkins (1798), back to Abbot after the 1803 bankruptcy, then to Dr. Foster (1809), his widow (1810), and William Richardson (1817).

Title References Expand all

Recorded is Book/Page at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds unless noted; Probate # is a Middlesex probate case, Ctf a Land Court certificate of title.