Jones Farmhouse

The Jones Farmhouse stood at the end of Tufts Lane, southeast of the town center, on the house lot laid out in 1660 to Joseph Tompson. The town record describes it as "twenty and seaven acres, be it more or lesse, lying near the most easterly part of Mr. Dudley's farme," bounded on the west by Simon Crosby, Tompson's stepbrother, on the south by William Hamlet and on the east by Peter Bracket. Town historian Henry Hazen noted that Tufts Lane is a surviving fragment of the old road that ran along the north side of Tompson's land.

Joseph Tompson, son of Rev. William Tompson of Braintree, was one of the best educated men in the young town. When the colony asked about Billerica's schools in 1679, the selectmen answered that "ensigne Tompson is appointed to teach those to write & read that will come to him," making him the town's first schoolmaster, and it was many years before he had a successor. He was also deacon of the church, town clerk after Jonathan Danforth, captain of the militia company, and representative to the General Court. During King Philip's War his family was assigned to Simon Crosby's garrison next door. He died in 1732.

The homestead passed to his son Benjamin Tompson, town clerk, who died in 1753, and then to Benjamin's son William Tompson, Esq., a leading townsman during the Revolution, who died in 1806 owning about 150 acres here. That November, Deacon Samuel Whiting surveyed the "Homestead Place" at 149 acres. The farm went to William's heirs, among them the children of his daughter Sarah and Dr. Isaac Hurd, and by 1816 Dr. Hurd, then of Concord, held it. He mortgaged the "homestead place of William Thompson" to John Skinner, a Charlestown merchant, in 1816 and 1820, and the Hurds released it to Skinner in 1829. The Tompson family's nearly 170 years on the land ended there.

In November 1829 Skinner sold the farm to Bernard Tufts of Medford, who, in Hazen's words, "purchased the ancient Tompson place at the end of the lane." Tufts sold about fifteen acres to Harvey Crosby in 1845 and kept the rest, 134 acres with the house. His son Edmund died in 1865, and Bernard died at the farm on December 3, 1866, aged 78, leaving it to his sons Joseph Barnard Tufts and Alfred Tufts. Joseph B. Tufts was living there when Hazen wrote in 1883, and the lane to the farm took the family's name.

In August 1888 the Tufts brothers sold the 134-acre farm "with the buildings thereon" to Nathaniel P. Jones of Melrose for $6,000, and the next year he deeded it to his son, Nathaniel R. Jones. The property became known as Jones Farm. An 1896 deed between father and son for a small lot on Tufts Lane is bounded in part "by wall of old house." In 1912 Nathaniel R. Jones put the farm in the name of his wife, Edith F. Jones, and it stayed in the family for more than half a century, carried on the assessors' list as the "Estate of Edith Jones, Tufts Lane."

The farmhouse was taken down about 1965. In 1969 the Jones heirs sold the farm to James E. and Phyllis C. Farmer, who combined it with the neighboring Musgrave's Tower Farm and laid out the Tower Farm Estates subdivision in 1970. The site of the old house became Lot 269, 10 Tufts Lane, where a new house was built in 1997.

References

1. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883): Joseph Tompson, schoolmaster, and the Tompson and Tufts families in the Genealogical Register

Deed References Expand all

Recorded is Book/Page at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds unless noted.