Isaac Brown House

The Isaac Brown House stood on the southeast side of Rangeway Road in the northwestern part of Billerica, at what was numbered 121 Rangeway Road, until it burned on May 18, 2000. It was a two-chimney Federal farmhouse with a sidelighted doorway, and for more than a century it was the centre of the Brown family farm, known in the deeds of the 1870s to 1900s simply as the "Isaac Brown Homestead". MACRIS records it as the Thomas Brown House (BIL.208). The site is now part of the Swanson Meadows condominium.

The Browns were on the Rangeway by the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1749 Thomas Brown, then a labourer of Woburn, bought thirty-five acres on the west side of Concord River from James Frost, bounded "northwest by the range Way" and "Southwardly by the Land of John Brown and Nathaniel Brown". In 1788 Thomas deeded that tract, "my Homestead ... with all the Buildings thereon", to his son Thomas Jr., who charged it with small legacies for his brother John and his sisters and sold it to Asa Spaulding in 1799. The elder Thomas kept a second farm on the old Brown land to the south, and that is the farm that became Isaac's. No recorded deed shows how it came to him; it appears to have been family land.

Thomas Brown's will, written in January 1804 and proved in February 1806, left his widow Lucy the use of everything to bring up the younger children, and the residue to the children equally. The inventory lists "The homestead of said deceased situated in said Billerica containing 50 acres more or less with the buildings thereon", valued at $900. The house was therefore standing before 1805, which supports the MACRIS suggestion that it was built by Thomas rather than by his son.

Isaac Brown, one of the younger sons, stayed on the farm and spent a quarter of a century buying out his brothers and sisters. Elisha sold him his share in 1810 and Jonas (with the share he had bought from Joab) in 1813, both describing Isaac as a labourer. Jacob, who had moved to Athens, Vermont, sold in 1823. The last two shares came in 1837 from his sisters Lucy, wife of Joseph Cowdry, and Rebecca, wife of Benoni Spaulding Jr., whose deeds describe "about fifty acres of land more or less with the buildings thereon ... of which the late Thomas Brown ... died seized", "the same now occupied by said Isaac".

Isaac farmed on credit. He mortgaged "the homestead place on which I live" to John and Henry Baldwin in 1831, to Sewall Stearns and to James C. Rowell of Carlisle in 1841 (by then a seventy-acre farm on both sides of the road), and to Marshall Preston in 1847. The 1847 mortgage gives the clearest picture of the place: "one lot on the east side of the range way road ... with my dwelling house thereon where I now live containing ten acres", and fifty acres opposite on the west side. Stearns's administrator won a judgment for possession in 1850 and entered to foreclose in 1851, but Isaac paid off the Stearns debt in March 1852 with a new $700 mortgage from Joseph Hartwell of Bedford, and kept the farm. The house does not appear on the 1853 map, but the 1875 Beers atlas marks it "I. Brown".

Isaac died in 1876. His administrator, Rufus D. Lothrop, sold "the said deceased homestead ... with all the buildings thereon, containing fifty acres" at auction on November 21, 1876 to Matthias Hutchins of Carlisle for $1,629.75, subject to the Hartwell mortgage. Isaac's widow Elizabeth released her dower, and the next day Hutchins deeded "the 'Isaac Brown Homestead'" to Lothrop himself. Lothrop kept the farm until January 1892, when he sold it for $2,000 to two brothers from Lowell, Anton J. and Magnus Svensson, keeping the right to live in the buildings until April 1. Anton deeded his half to Magnus within days. Magnus, by then of Billerica, had the farm surveyed by Osgood and Snell in 1897 and refinanced it with the Lowell Co-operative Bank in 1900.

In 1910 Magnus Svensson deeded the part east of the Rangeway, with the house, to Anton W. Swanson, and in 1944 Anton put it in his own and his wife Annie's names. Anton died in 1952 and Annie held the farm for the rest of her life. When Charles Stearns recorded the house for the Billerica Historical Commission in 1973, the owner was their son Weston E. Swanson, the farm covered about 33 acres with some 1,500 feet of frontage, and Stearns noted that he knew of "nobody except the present owner who has seen the interior of the house".

In 1999 Weston Swanson and a co-heir of Annie Swanson divided the land on a plan by Raymond Engineering Service. Lot 1, about 1.2 acres with "Ex. House #121", went to Weston, and the remaining 88.3 acres, including the Isaac Brown land and the old Harrington farm to the south, were sold to Rangeway Farms, LLC for $1,200,000. The house burned on May 18, 2000 and was demolished on June 1. After Weston's death his executors sold the house lot to Rangeway Farms in 2001, and in January 2002 the company recorded the master deed of Swanson Meadows Condominium I, whose town-house units at 216 Rangeway Road now occupy the farm.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.208

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.