Francis Blanchard House

The Francis Blanchard House stands on a one-acre lot at the corner of Pollard Street (the old Boston or Fordway road) and Salem Road, with the old North burying ground on its south side. The lot has kept the same bounds in every deed for more than two centuries: west on the Boston road, south on "the burying ground," east on the neighbouring farm and north on the Salem road for "fifteen rods nine links."

The acre was part of a seventy-acre tract on the east side of the road "leading from Billerica meeting house to the Ford way," which ran south to "the burying place." Edward Rand, a Newburyport merchant, sold the tract with its buildings to Enoch Chase, a Billerica cordwainer, in 1795, and Chase sold it in 1796 to Thomas Richardson, who kept the tavern across the road. On April 14, 1800 Richardson sold the corner acre for $290 to Francis Blanchard, a blacksmith. The deed names no buildings, and it carries a condition that if Blanchard should "keep or suffer to be kept any retail, Inn, or Tavern on the premises" Richardson might take the land back: a guard for Richardson's own tavern. Blanchard built here soon after; by 1810 the acre was described "with all the buildings thereon," lying "nearly opposite the house and store of Stephen Barrett junr." (the Stephen Barrett House).

Blanchard did not lose the place over the tavern clause. In 1807 he gave Josiah Crosby a $600 security deed of the acre and of 22 acres west of the Concord River, repeating that "no retailer of spirituous liquors or Innholder" should ever use the premises. In 1810 a Cambridge lawyer, Timothy Fuller, won a judgment of $243 against him, and the deputy sheriff sold Blanchard's right to redeem the mortgaged land at auction on November 12, 1810 to Josiah B. Richardson, another blacksmith, for $145. In 1812 Richardson bought out Crosby's mortgage title for $633.11 and so held the whole.

Josiah B. Richardson kept the corner for half a century. He mortgaged it to the Town in 1820 and in 1845 to Dr. Zadok Howe, whose mortgage passed in 1860 to the trustees of the Howe School. He made his will in 1856 and died at Medford on December 25, 1860, leaving the property to his daughter Elizabeth Derby and the children of his late daughter Lavinia Teel. In April 1862 the Derbys released their rights to Elbridge Teel, a Medford wheelwright and the Teel children's father, who the next day sold the acre "with the buildings thereon," together with the seventeen-acre "Wallace lot" on the Salem road, to Samuel Osgood of Chelmsford for $1,000.

Osgood kept the place until his death; in 1899 his executor, Herbert A. King, sold the acre for $1,600 to Susan F. Hutchins. In 1903 she granted the Boston and Northern Street Railway a strip along the Fordway Road front for its tracks, and in 1909 she and her husband conveyed the place to George A. Osgood. He sold it in 1926 to Edith G. Markus of Lowell, who sold it in May 1928 to Munro J. Pedley of Lyndonville, Vermont; he passed it the same month to Ida B. Kitchen of Billerica, subject to the railway's right of way. Mrs. Kitchen, by then a widow, sold "202 Pollard Street" in 1963, and the house has since passed through private owners.

Josiah B. Richardson's title came from a sheriff's sale for one of Blanchard's debts and a separate purchase of the mortgage in 1812. Richardson made his will in 1856 and died in December 1860. The "Wallace lot" named in the deeds of 1845 to 1862 is the separate seventeen-acre tract on the Salem road sold with the corner acre, not this lot.

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.