James Barrington

James Barrington was the elder of two English brothers who settled in North Billerica in the 1880s and gave their name to a cluster of houses on what became Billerica Avenue. He was born in England on November 6, 1843, a son of Roger Barrington and Rachel Worrall, and was christened in Manchester the following April. He married Mary Jane Wallwork, and their two children, Mary and Albert, were born in England in 1867 and 1868.

The family came to North Billerica, where the Talbot woolen mills drew a steady stream of workers from the textile towns of Lancashire. In September 1886 James bought an acre from Martin Conway on the east side of a new fifteen foot passageway, bounded by land of the heirs of Thomas Talbot, and added a second parcel that December. The passageway became Billerica Avenue, and the house he built there, the James Barrington House at 31 Billerica Avenue, appears with its south facing bay windows on L. R. Burleigh's 1887 bird's eye view of North Billerica. His younger brother Roger bought the lot next door.

James worked with his hands, and the town paid him through the 1890s for labor, carpentry and repairs at Union Hall, the North Billerica meeting hall. The jury lists called him a stone mason in 1899 and a carpenter in the years that followed. His family knew loss early: his daughter Mary, a mill weaver, died of tuberculosis in March 1890 at 23, and his son Albert died in 1899 at 30.

James Barrington died in Billerica on January 28, 1904, and was buried in the North Cemetery. He left his land to his widow, who sold the southern two thirds of the lot with the house to Mary Casey that April and kept the northern third. Mary Jane Barrington died in Nashua, New Hampshire, on July 4, 1920, and was buried beside him; a perpetual care fund for the James Barrington lot was added to the town's cemetery trusts in 1919.

References

1. Find a Grave: James Barrington (1843-1904), North Cemetery.
2. 1895 Billerica Town Report: James Barrington, labor and repairs at Union Hall.
3. 1897 Billerica Town Report: James Barrington, carpenter work.
4. 1899 Billerica Town Report: jury list, James Barrington, stone mason.
5. 1903 Billerica Town Report: jury list, James Barrington, carpenter.
6. 1919 Billerica Town Report: perpetual care fund for the James Barrington lot.