George E. Simonds

George E. Simonds (about 1861 to 1917) was a North Billerica farmer who served the town as an assessor from 1898 to 1901, sat on the Bowers Fund Committee for nearly twenty years, and was chosen a surveyor of wood and lumber every year from the mid-1890s until his death. His farm was on Nashua Road near the schoolhouse, where the 1901 directory lists William H. Simonds and Bror Soderstrom as farm hands, and where Howard G. Simonds, a farmer and later a motorman, boarded in 1912 and 1916.

The town's accounts show the practical side of a farmer's part in town business: payments to him for wood, for removing snow with his team and others in the hard winters of the 1890s and 1910s, and for gravel and "breaking roads" after storms. In 1902 the highway surveyor scraped the gutters and graveled 650 feet of road near his place.

At the annual meeting of 1898 he was elected an assessor with 272 votes, joining Josiah Wright and John E. Rowell, and he served with Wright and, from 1900, William H. Hutchins. At the annual meeting of March 27, 1899, on motion of Oren Maybury, he was made a member of the Bowers Fund Committee, which managed the Bowers and Stearns funds for the care of the town's poor, for five years, and he was reappointed in 1910. In 1906 he and George H. Harlow were drawn as traverse jurors for the Superior Court at Lowell.

The town's death register for 1917 records the death of George Ellsworth Simonds on November 18, 1917, at the age of 55 years, 11 months and 17 days, and his name does not appear among the town's officers after that year.

References

1. Town of Billerica Annual Report 1899: annual meeting of 1898; George E. Simonds elected assessor with 272 votes; surveyors of wood
2. Town of Billerica Annual Report 1906: George E. Simonds and George H. Harlow drawn as traverse jurors
3. Town of Billerica Annual Report 1917 (1915-19 volume): deaths, George Ellsworth Simonds, Nov. 18, aged 55 y. 11 m. 17 d.