Hickory Lane
Hickory Lane is a short residential street in North Billerica, east of Letchworth Avenue and the Garden Suburb, in the neighborhood of Seven Oaks Road, Alleghany Avenue, Heather Circle, Balmoral Drive and Whitegate Road. It is a modern subdivision street. It does not appear in the town directories of 1901 to 1931, in the town reports before 1972, or in the town's 1956 list of accepted streets, and it is not on the official map of 1831 or among the roads accepted in 2016. The name is one of the tree and nature names favored by builders of the period (Heather Circle adjoins it), and no record connects it with a person or a particular tree.
The town accepted Hickory Lane as a public way at the annual town meeting of March 1972, under Article 40, which accepted a long list of new streets "in accordance with the layout by the Board of Selectmen, on file with the Town Clerk"; Hickory Lane is number 17 on the list, next to Heather Circle and Meadow Glen Road. At the annual meeting of May 1984 the town voted unanimously to abandon a strip of land three feet wide and about 54 feet long at the easterly end of Hickory Lane, along an old stone boundary; the residents told the Planning Board that they did not want future development to make Hickory Lane "a throughway," but agreed to a drain easement through the strip. The street has since been maintained as an ordinary town way, and was crack sealed in fiscal 2017.