John A. Richardson

John Alden Richardson (1867-1929) was a Billerica lumber dealer who held one town office or another for thirty-five years, from the 1890s until his death. According to Hazen's genealogical register he was born on February 9, 1867, the son of John Oliver Richardson and Pamelia (Jacques) Richardson of Tewksbury, who had married in 1848; his father lived beside the railroad opposite Billerica station, with his uncle Albert living across the highway. His grandfather John Richardson was a son of Oliver Richardson, and his older sister Fanny Pamelia married Homer H. Colby in 1878. He entered the Howe School in 1879.

He was still in his twenties when the town made him its auditor in 1894 and then its treasurer, an office he held from 1895 until 1900, when Herbert A. King took it over together with the town clerkship. He became a trustee of the Howe School in 1895, and in 1900 he was added to the committee that was preparing the town's early records for printing. From 1901 to 1922 he was one of the commissioners of the School House Sinking Fund, and from 1903 to 1906 he sat on the Select Board with Charles H. Kohlrausch and Richard T. Perry, the selectmen also serving as the town's fence viewers. He was a member of the Finance Committee from 1910 to 1921, served with Edgar P. Sellew on the committee that drafted the town's building by-laws in 1914 and 1915, and in 1917 was named with Ralph E. Manning and Ernest N. Bartlett to the committee that bought a motor fire truck for the town and built a fire station for it. Elected a Cemetery Commissioner in 1914, he held that office until his death.

On July 1, 1912, he opened a retail lumber yard at Bennett Hall Station. The yard had an acre of storage ground, a building 20 by 112 feet for finish, mouldings, doors and windows, and an open shed for laths and shingles, and by December it had sold more than 120,000 feet of lumber and 275,000 shingles; he planned to add a woodworking shop run by an electric motor. His advertisements in the monthly magazine Billerica offered spruce and hemlock, North Carolina sheathing and flooring, Washington red cedar shingles, and plasterboard, then something new for walls and ceilings. He was clerk of the First Parish (Unitarian) church and treasurer of the Billerica Board of Trade, organized in 1911, and in 1913 he was one of the surviving charter members of Talbot Lodge No. 41 of the New England Order of Protection, founded in 1888.

John A. Richardson died on February 28, 1929, at the age of 62, while still a cemetery commissioner; the town report for that year marks his name as deceased in the list of town officers.

References

1. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), Genealogical Register p. 122, RICHARDSON family #32
2. Catalogue of Howe High School, 1897, pupils admitted 1879
3. Report of the Selectmen, 1905
4. Committee on Building By-Laws, Town Report 1915
5. 'Billerica' magazine, December 1912 (The New Lumber Yard)
6. 'Billerica' magazine, July 1912 (First Parish Church officers)
7. 'Billerica' magazine, February 1913 (New England Order of Protection, charter members)
8. Deaths, 1929 (Town Report)