George Bowers House

The house marked "G. Bowers" on the west side of the Boston road on the 1853 map of Billerica was the farmhouse of George Bowers (born 1811), son of Jonathan Stickney Bowers. The farm lay between two pieces of land owned by George's brother-in-law Benjamin K. Heald: Heald's house lot (the old Norton farm) to the north and the 36-acre farm George sold Heald in 1851 to the south. Earlier deeds call it "the farm lately of Jonathan Stickney" and "the Jonathan Stickney place", after the family of George's grandmother Silence Stickney Bowers. In the deeds that followed, the farm was always "the Jona. S. Bowers homestead".

George bought 20 acres on the Boston road from his uncle Dr. Josiah Bowers of Smithtown, New York, in March 1844 for $2,500 (bounded north by the land of the late Benjamin Bowers and west by William Bowers). He recited in 1853 that the rest of the homestead had come to him from his father. On March 25, 1853, he and his wife Harriet L. (Poor) Bowers sold the farm, "supposed about thirty acres", together with the four-acre Bell Meadow "formerly owned by Jonathan Bowers Esq.", to the same uncle, now a physician of New York City, for $4,000, "with the buildings privileges and appurtenances". When Jonathan S. Bowers died in 1855 his estate held no real estate, only a $500 note from Dr. Josiah Bowers dated two months after the sale.

Dr. Josiah Bowers came home to Billerica and died there on November 5, 1868. His will empowered his executor Jonathan Hill to sell "my homestead farm". In May 1869 Hill and the widow Lucretia H. Bowers sold it, about forty acres "known as the Jona. S. Bowers homestead and the 'Bell meadow'", to A. K. Carruthers of Boston for $2,800. Carruthers sold it in 1871 to William F. Burrows, who sold it in two undivided halves in 1872. One half went to Rhoda B. Ward and from her to Abel Spalding, and Spalding bought the other half directly. In 1873 Spalding divided the farm, selling the northern part beside Heald's land to James E. Morris for $1,225. Morris put it in his wife Mary A. Morris's name through George D. Wyman of Derby, Vermont, in 1874. In 1876 the Morrises, by then of Des Moines, Iowa, sold it to Minot A. Merriam, and in 1886 Merriam sold it to Dudley Foster. Foster bought the southern part from Mary A. Haskell in 1889, so the old farm was whole again as the "Bowers Farm" of 35 acres on the west side of Boston Road.

None of the deeds from 1869 onward mentions a building, and the farm sold for less in 1869 than in 1853, so the Bowers house was probably gone by the 1870s. Dudley Foster's heirs, Frank D. Foster and Lucy B. Collier, sold the land in 1918 to Frederick E. Mason, who deeded it to his wife Rachel F. Mason (later Rachel F. Rosatto) in 1922. The Masons farmed here and on Farmers Lane, and family house lots were later cut out along the road. The house at 493 Boston Road stood on Lots 4 and 5 of a 1970 plan drawn for Rachel Rosatto. It passed to private owners and through a 1993 mortgage foreclosure by Shawmut Bank. In October 2001 Stoneham Cooperative Bank bought it "with the buildings thereon" for $600,000, along with the adjoining 489 lot, and in 2002 it put up the brick bank building that now stands on the combined 1.58-acre parcel.

References

1. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), Genealogical Register: Bowers 7-8 (Benjamin, Jonathan Stickney and his son George Bowers)

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.