Horman Road

Horman Road is a short street in North Billerica running northeast from Pollard Street a little north of the High Street corner. Until 1988 it was Walnut Street, one of the streets of Fordway Park, a tract of house lots in North Billerica between Fordway Road (now Pollard Street) and a parallel street called Broadway, laid out for the J. W. Wilbur Co. on a plan dated May 1897 by Frederic R. Page, civil engineer, of Boston (Plan Book 13 Plan 5). The plan's cross streets, beginning at the end nearest The Fordway, were Beacon, Maple, Walnut, Chestnut, Oak and Hawthorne Streets, with Lee and Sheldon Streets crossing the last three.

Walnut Street was the second of the Fordway Park streets, after Maple Street, to be taken over by the town. The warrant for the annual meeting of March 1905 asked the town to accept "a road laid out by the Selectmen in the locality known as Fordway Park, to be called Walnut Street," and to raise $200 to build it, and on March 27, 1905 the meeting voted "that the road called Walnut Street in Fordway Park be accepted." The work was done later: the account printed in 1908 shows $159 spent on the street and $5 paid to Hall, Barron & Watson for "securing of deeds of Walnut Street." The directories of 1916 and 1919 describe it as running "from Pollard to woods" and "from Pollard byd Maple to woods."

Drainage was a long trouble. Articles for drainage on "Walnut Street, North Billerica" came before the meetings of 1926 and 1927, a committee appointed in 1927 had the street surveyed, and in 1928 the town voted $1,000 "to grade and drain Walnut Street"; the drain cost $995.45. An article of 1929 to "tar and gravel and excavate the approach of Walnut Street" was dismissed. As the only Walnut Street the town had accepted before 1946, it is the one the highway reports describe as "scraped, rolled and oiled" in 1936 and given a "tar seal-coat" over its whole length in 1943.

By the 1980s Billerica had three Walnut Streets: this one, one at Nutting Lake and one in the Central Park development off Pond Street. In the selectmen's campaign of 1988 to 1991 against duplicate street names, the board voted on April 25, 1988, effective July 1, 1988, to rename "Walnut Street, 2nd right off Pollard Street beyond High Street," as Horman Road; the other two became Yale Street and Gove Road. The committee's reasons were not printed. Horman is the name of a North Billerica family of the twentieth century: Reginald F. Horman served on the town's police force from the later 1930s and afterward as a fire captain, and Paul J. Horman, of the Howe High School class of 1941, was killed in the Second World War; in 1957 the town voted $150 for Paul J. Horman Square at the junction of Rogers and High Streets.

Walnut Street was not one of the roads of the 1831 town map accepted by the town in 2016, and it came too late for the street lists of 1897 and 1899. The town's 1956 list of accepted streets gives "Walnut St. (N. B.) 3-27-05."

References

1. Annual Report of the Town of Billerica, 1906: the March 1905 meeting accepts the road called Walnut Street in Fordway Park and raises $200 to build it
2. Annual Report of the Town of Billerica, 1956: list of streets accepted by the town, with Walnut St. (N. B.) 3-27-05
3. Annual Report of the Town of Billerica, 1988: selectmen's sub-committee for re-naming streets; Walnut Street, 2nd right off Pollard Street beyond High Street, renamed Horman Road (voted April 25, 1988)
4. Annual Report of the Town of Billerica, 1990: Street Renaming Committee report; 214 street names changed between 1988 and January 1991