Joel Dix

Died	1860-12-23 Billerica, MA
Spouses	Priscilla Parker

Joel Dix was born about 1784. He and his wife Priscilla, who was some six years younger, lived first in Chelmsford, where their children Clarissa (1811), Sibbil (1813), Mary (1815), Joel (1817) and Almira (1819) were born. By 1821 they had moved to Billerica, where Eliza Jane (1821), Fanny (1823), Sarah (1825), Albert H. (1829) and Lucy Ann (1831) followed. The source of his title of captain has not been found.

In 1822 he bought from the Proprietors of the Middlesex Canal the house now known as the Captain Joel Dix House at 2 Elm Street, which the blacksmith Jonathan Farmer had built about 1815 on a lot east of Mears' tavern stand and which had come back to the Proprietors when Farmer and his partner failed. According to the Historical Commission's survey of the house, one of his sisters married John Mixer, a boatman (Hazen records that John Mixer married Nancy Dix), and another married Jonathan Wilson, a stone-layer who bought a house east of the dam in 1814, so that a small group of related families made their own homes in the village that grew up around the canal company's mills.

His daughters married in Billerica: Sybil to George W. Rand in 1835, Clarissa to Warren Richardson of Westford in 1836, Eliza Jane to Warren M. Batcheller in 1839, and Sarah M. to John Olney in 1846. Fanny died in July 1848 at twenty-four. After the death of the tavern keeper Mears, Dix acquired an interest in Mears' tavern stand, and by 1859 he owned, besides the homestead of about four acres "with the buildings thereon" in North Billerica, the four-acre "Tavern Stand," meadows known as the Holden, Manning and Bussy meadows, the Plain lot, the Tufts lot and eight acres on Gilson Hill, appraised together at $7,960.98. His personal estate included a horse, a sleigh, three ploughs, farming tools and "1 Chest of carpenter tools."

In 1859, on the petition of his daughter Mary, the Probate Court found that he was no longer able to take care of himself and appointed Horace N. Wilson of Billerica his guardian, with Daniel Wilson and James Faulkner as sureties; Benjamin L. Judkins, Israel A. Colson and Daniel Wilson appraised the estate. In February 1860 the court licensed the guardian to sell part of the real estate for his maintenance.

Joel Dix died at Billerica on December 23, 1860, without a will and leaving no widow. Edwin A. Alger of Lowell was appointed administrator in February 1861. The heirs were his sons Joel and Albert H. Dix, his daughters Sybil Rand of Methuen, Mary Dix, Eliza Jane Blood, then living in Vermont, and Almira Dix, and the children of his late daughters Clarissa Richardson, Mrs. Olney and Lucy Ann Carland. The appraisers, Judkins, Anthony Jones and Dudley Foster, valued his homestead at $2,500 and "2/3 of Mears Tavern Stand" at $2,300. Jones and Foster succeeded him there and appear to have let both the Dix house and the tavern stand as rental property. Joel and Priscilla Dix have gravestones in the North Cemetery. His house, thought to be the last center-chimney house in Billerica, burned in October 1996.

Joel Dix

Joel Dix

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