John Kitchen House

The John Kitchen House stands at the southwest corner of High Street and Corthell Road in North Billerica, with Wallace Road along the south side of its lot. It was the farmhouse of a fifteen-acre farm that ran along the west side of the old road from Billerica to Lowell, now High Street, for 72 rods, with the land of Calvin Rogers on the south and the Boston and Lowell Railroad on the east and north. The deeds called it "the Ruggles place", and in 1883 Hazen placed Joseph Ruggles, a taxpayer of December 1776, at the "Kitchen place, near railroad, southeast of North Billerica". A barn stands behind the house on the same lot.

The Ruggles family still owned land here when the railroad was built. In 1834 Lucy Ruggles and Wyatt and Sally P. Richards of Boston sold the Boston and Lowell Rail Road Corporation the strip "taken and occupied by said Corporation for their Rail Road", bounded on the north by "other land late of the grantors, now of Elizabeth Stevens". How the farm passed from the Ruggles family to Elizabeth Stevens and then to the children of Thaddeus Pierce is not in the deed or probate indexes. In October 1838 Pierce's widow, Lucetta, told the Probate Court that her five young children had inherited the property from a grandparent. The appraisers, James R. Faulkner, John Rogers and Calvin Rogers, valued "about sixteen acres of land with a house and barn on the same ... being the homestead lately occupied by Thad. Pierce" at $500. The Hales map of 1831 also shows a house at this corner.

The children's guardian, Abner Kittredge of Lowell, sold "the place called the Ruggles place" at auction in December 1838 for $580 to the brothers Seth Johnson Jr. and Joseph Johnson of Woburn. By 1851 they were living in Winchester and called themselves housewrights. In June 1851 they sold the farm for $1,250, more than twice what they had paid, to Mary Ann Kitchen, wife of John Kitchen of Lowell. That rise in price may mean the Johnsons rebuilt or enlarged the house, which would fit the assessor's estimate that it was built about 1848. The Walling map of 1853 marks the house "J. Kitchen". The Kitchens kept the farm for 57 years, and the name stuck: it was still the "Kitchen place" when Hazen wrote in 1883. The house took its name from the 1853 map label, and it is now named for John Kitchen in full. Mary Ann Kitchen, by then a widow, sold the fifteen acres in January 1908 to Lottie E. Spline, wife of Daniel M. Spline of Somerville, subject to a lease held by "one Nutting".

The farm then changed hands quickly. It went from the Splines to Emma J. Zahm in 1909, to Alexander Soutter of Cambridge in 1910 and to David Soutter later that year, to Antoinette W. Davis of Boston in 1911, and in March 1911 to George H. Hill of Boston. That August the surveyor James A. Bancroft drew "Hillcrest", Estate of Geo. H. Hill, for the Boston agents Pelkey Wallace Co. (Plan Book 29, Plan 58). The plan laid out Corthell and Wallace Roads and small house lots across the farm, and it left the old house and barn on a corner tract labeled the "One Acre Farm". Hill mortgaged the One Acre Farm "with the buildings thereon" to the Millinocket Trust Company of Maine in 1911. The company foreclosed in 1914 and in 1915 sold the farm to Herman S. Holder of Berlin. Holder sold the western part on Wallace Road in 1916, and in 1922 and 1923 he sold the house and the land north of it to Corthell Road to Gladys S. Roberts. Those two deeds created the present lot.

Gladys Roberts sold the house in 1925 to Joseph E. and Hester Heskett, and the Hesketts sold it in 1927 to Percy R. Coldwell of Berlin. The Lowell Co-operative Bank foreclosed on Coldwell's mortgage during the Depression, after advertising the sale in the Billerica News in February 1933, and bought the property at its own sale for $1,600. Its directors then sold it to Willard R. Gillette for $1,800. Gillette passed it in 1934 to George R. and Elizabeth R. Gillette. In 1944 they sold it to Herbert A. and Theresa V. Patterson, and in 1949 Theresa Patterson, then a widow, sold it to private owners. The house has been privately owned ever since, with sales in 1980, 1985, 1988, 1995, 1997, 2004 and 2019. Today it is a single-family house on 0.369 acre. The assessor describes it as an old-style house with wood shingle siding, six rooms and three bedrooms.

References

1. Billerica assessor, 116 High St (parcel 10-166-0): 0.369 acre, old style house built about 1848, sales 1988-2019
2. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), tax list of December 1776: Joseph Ruggles, "Kitchen place, near railroad, southeast of North Billerica"

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.