Iron Horse Park
Iron Horse Park is the name of a private road that runs southeast from High Street in North Billerica into the grounds of the former Boston & Maine Railroad shops, and of the industrial park that grew up there. The railroad assembled the site in 1911 from some thirty parcels of farm, meadow and wood land "on High Street, Pond Street and the Road to Salem"; its plan of the purchase, dated April 1911, was recorded on May 1, 1911 (Plan Book 28 Plan 73). Construction of the car and locomotive repair plant began in January 1911 on low, wet ground that needed five to six hundred thousand yards of fill; the locomotive shops opened in February 1914 and the car shops in April. The road from High Street into the grounds dates from the building of the shops; the railroad's purchase plan shows no earlier way there.
The shops set off a rush of house lot plans nearby. George H. Hill's Hillcrest plans of 1911 to 1914, across High Street, advertised "only elevated lots between Boston & Maine car shops (to employ about 3000 men) and Center of the Town," and the Central Park plan of 1914 marked the "Main Entrance to Car Shops" on Pond Street. After the 1940s, as the railroad's repair work declined, the B&M sold or leased parts of the plant, and by 1968 the area was known as Iron Horse Park, an industrial park in which General Latex Corp. built an addition to its pilot plant that year; in 1971 the former P. F. Avery building "in Iron Horse Park" was taken over by the Torngren Co. The name is the old nickname of the railroad locomotive. State offices in the 1970s gave their address as "1A Iron Horse Park, 67 High St."
A sewer contract finished in 1979 let "the Boston and Maine's Iron Horse Park" discharge to the town system, and in February 1990 the park put its own pumping station on line. In the 1980s the land was studied by the Environmental Protection Agency as the Iron Horse Park Superfund site. The road has never been accepted as a town way, and it is not one of the roads of the 1831 town map accepted in 2016.