Isaiah Bussey House

The Isaiah Bussey House stands at 22 Old Elm Street in North Billerica, on the south side of the old road from Oliver Farmer's house to the Canal Mills. Its lot is one of the "small lots" the Proprietors of the Middlesex Canal laid out by the mills after they bought Thomas Richardson's forty acres and "Richardson's Mills" in 1794. On March 15, 1826 the Canal sold John Mixer three of those lots on the south side of the road, three quarters of an acre bounded east and south by the homestead of Nathan Mears, together with the lots across the road where Mixer built his own house.

On July 6, 1827 Mixer sold the easterly end of his south lot, four rods on the road and ten rods deep, to Isaiah Bussey of Billerica, a clothier working at the Faulkner Mills, for $120. The deed names no buildings, so the house dates from Bussey's ten years on the lot. In 1830 Bussey married Almira Chase Wood, a daughter of the widow Anna (Mears) Wood, whose red house stood next door to the east (earlier accounts had him marrying the widow herself). On September 25, 1837 Bussey, then calling himself a yeoman, sold "a certain parcel of land with the buildings thereon standing ... near the Canal Mills", thirty-seven square rods running back from the road past "the said Anna's building formerly a Shoemaker's Shop", with seven acres of the old Mears homestead by the river, to Daniel Wilson for $1,500. His wife signed the deed as Nancy Bussey. Bussey then left town.

Wilson, who already owned the land around it, kept the house for twenty years. On December 14, 1857 he sold the same thirty-seven rods "with the buildings thereon" to his neighbor Lott Easty, a trader who owned the red house to the east, and in 1859 added an eleven-foot strip along the west side for $55. In 1865 Easty passed the house through W. S. Bates of Lowell to his wife Mary F. Easty "in her own right", and the couple mortgaged it to Joseph Stearns in 1866 for $1,500, paying the loan off early in 1867. On June 28, 1869 Easty sold the place, by then bounded by Gardner Parker's land on the west and south and by C. P. Talbot & Co. on the east, to Oren Sheldon for $2,000, and the next day Sheldon sold it for the same price to Charles P. Talbot and Thomas Talbot, owners of the woolen mill across the road.

For the next sixty-eight years the house was mill housing. The Talbots' firm, C. P. Talbot & Co., owned it on the 1875 map, and in 1884 the family conveyed it with their other North Billerica property to The Talbot Mills corporation. When the company divided its village lands on the 1936 Monahan plan, the house lot became Lot 34 of Plan A, 51.88 feet on Elm Street and 6,316 square feet, and on January 23, 1937 The Talbot Mills sold it to Rossi P. and Bernice T. Burns, who financed the purchase with a $700 mortgage from the Union Old Lowell National Bank.

Bernice Trefry Burns owned the house when Charles E. Stearns recorded it for the Billerica Historical Commission in 1974. It was sold out of the family in 1980 and resold in 1984 and 1986. In 1992 the owners gave it to their mortgage lender, Shearson Lehman Hutton Mortgage Corporation, by a deed in lieu of foreclosure, and the lender passed it to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, who sold it in 1994 to the family that still owns it. The house lies within the North Billerica (Talbot Mills) National Register district (1983) and the local historic district (1992). The assessor gives it a construction date of "about 1900", but the deeds place a house on the lot by 1837.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.91
2. Billerica assessor, parcel 9-120-0, 22 Old Elm St: 0.145 acres, Lot 34 Plan 60-25, sales history 1986-2007
3. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), Genealogical Register, Wood: Almira Chase Wood m. 1830 Isaiah Bussey

Deed References Expand all

Recorded is Book/Page at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds unless noted.