James Bennett House

The James Bennett House was an old farmhouse on the Burlington Road, now Bicknell Road, at the Burlington town line in the southeast corner of Billerica. The Walling map of 1853 marks it "Sanborn", after the family that owned it then, but for most of the first half of the nineteenth century it was the homestead of James Bennett, a Billerica gentleman who bought "The Homestead", partly in Billerica and partly in Burlington, from John Stearns in 1781. When Bennett died without a will about 1842, the appraisers of his estate listed it first among thirty parcels of land, ahead of the Kimball land over the line in Burlington and many woodlots and meadows (probate 27289).

In March 1847 three of his grandchildren and heirs, Dr. Josiah Bowers Jr. and Maria F. Bowers of Smithtown, New York, and Nancy Bowers of Fitchburg, sold their shares of "the homestead farm" to Thomas Dearing, a Charlestown carpenter. The deeds describe about eighty acres beginning "at the south easterly corner of said homestead at Billerica town line at the Kimball land", running across the road, by the Dean land, the old sheep pasture, "the share ... set off to the heirs of John Bennett", Josiah B. Gleason and the Jeremiah Carter land, "with the homestead buildings thereon". Dearing failed within the year, and in December 1848 his assignees in insolvency sold the farm "with the buildings thereon standing" to Francis Childs of Charlestown for $1,000.

Childs kept about twenty two acres of woodland and pasture to the east and in 1852 sold the rest, about fifty five acres with the use of a spring near the southwest corner, to Sarah D. F. Pierce of Roxbury. In March 1853 she and her husband Otis Pierce sold the "fifty eight acres" for $3,500 to Sarah E. Sanborn of Boston, and from her it passed to Christopher P. Sanborn, the "Sanborn" of the 1853 map. Sanborn sold the farm "with all the buildings thereon" to Patrick Downey of Billerica in April 1858 for $2,325, taking back a $1,600 mortgage. Downey could not pay, and in March 1859 Sanborn made "open, peaceable and unopposed entry" on the farm to foreclose.

Sanborn, by then living in Winchester, mortgaged the farm in 1862 to Henry A. Norris of Melrose, with the buildings to be insured for $1,000, and put the title in John Hallam of Boston for safekeeping. Hallam released it back in April 1873, "with the buildings thereon", and the same day Sanborn sold the fifty eight acres to George W. Richardson of Billerica for $2,250, adding the twenty two acre lot to the east in 1879. No later deed names any buildings. In 1928 Henrietta Foster of Burlington and six other heirs sold both parcels to the New England Power Construction Company for its Tewksbury to Boston transmission line, and in 1949 the New England Power Company sold the farm, less the strip under its towers, to John J. Flaherty of Billerica.

Flaherty laid out the land in 1956 as Bignel Acres, fourteen lots on "Bignel Road (Bennett Road)(Burlington Road)" between the power line and Carter Estates (Plan 87-144). He sold Lots 7 to 13 to the Hughes Lumber Company in 1963, which sold them in 1965 to Home Towne Builders, Inc. That October Home Towne Builders sold Lot 11 "with the buildings thereon", the split entry house that stands at 72 Bicknell Road today, and it has been privately owned since. The exact site of the Bennett farmhouse on the old farm is not fixed by the deeds, and when it was taken down is not known: it is last named in 1873 and was gone, or not worth mentioning, by 1928.

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.