Person · 1826
James R. Spalding
James R. Spalding
| Born | 1826-09-25 Boston, Massachusetts |
| Died | Boston, Massachusetts |
| Father | Amos Spalding |
| Mother | Mary Warren |
James Russell Spalding, known in the deeds as J. Russell Spalding, was a Boston apothecary who owned the old Shed farm on Boston Road in Billerica Centre and left it to the Howe School. He was born in Boston on September 25, 1826, a son of Deacon Amos Spalding, a teacher in Boston, Chelmsford and Billerica, a deacon of the Baptist church and one of the first trustees of the Howe School, and his first wife, Mary Walker of Chelmsford, whom he had married in 1819. His brother Amos Fletcher Spalding, a graduate of Brown University and the Newton Theological Seminary, became a Baptist minister, and his sister Mary Ann married Dr. George Faulkner. Hazen records that James Russell became an apothecary in Boston, and that he died there.
In 1854 Daniel W. Averill sold him the farm on the west side of the main road south of the Centre, between the road and the Concord River, still called "the Shed farm" in the 1840s; his father, who had lost his first wife in 1852 and married Mrs. Nancy (Warren) Blanchard of Littleton in 1857, lived on it. Spalding died in 1861 and by his will left the farm to the Trustees of the Howe School, where his father was a trustee and later president of the board. The trustees rented out "the Spalding Farm" for many years; in February 1890 they leased it, bounded by the street, the river and the land of Albert R. Richardson, to Charles A. Holt for ninety-nine years at two hundred dollars a year. Under a court decree of 1920 they registered the farm in the Land Court and sold it in 1922. Its south corner by the railroad later became the lumber yard of Grossman's, now 333 Boston Rd.