Joseph Locke House

The Joseph Locke House at 381 Boston Road, on the northwest corner of River Street in Billerica Centre, is a large Federal house with a hipped slate roof, built in 1810-1811 for the lawyer Joseph Locke. From 1885 it was a hotel, the "Stearns House" (later remembered as the Hillhurst), and from 1924 it was the home of the Stearns family for nearly seventy years. It stands in the National Register and local historic districts around the Town Common.

The land was once the east end of the homestead of the surveyor Jonathan Danforth, which ran from the country road west to the Concord River. Danforth's will, proved in 1712, reserved "the southerly part of my homestead" for his widow and then his seven children, who sold the sixty acres to Oliver Whiting Jr. in 1714. After Whiting died in 1757 his heirs sold the strip along the highway, "eight acres and ten poles" bounded south by the road, to the trader Oliver Abbot in 1758, and the next 24 acres west to Benjamin Lewis in 1760, "easterly by Oliver Abbott." When Abbot's estate was appraised in 1796, the corner was "a plat or peice of English mowing bounded Easterly on the Country Road leading to Boston ... southerly on a Road & on the Town Pound, Westerly on Doct. Bowerses land," two acres and 33 poles. It was set off to his widow Abigail as part of her dower, and between 1798 and 1803 Abbot's other children released their shares of it to his daughter Dorcas and her husband Jonathan Bowers. Bowers, who wrote his will in 1799 "being bound to sea," died in 1804 leaving half the use of his land to Dorcas and the rest to their son Alexander.

On June 14, 1810 Dorcas Bowers, then a widow in Boston, and Alexander Bowers of Charlestown sold Joseph Locke "a certain peice or parcell of land ... containing about three acres" at "a corner on the main road leading to Amherst, and on a road leading to Carlisle," for $400. No buildings are mentioned: Locke built the house on vacant land, and the 1811 date given by the Historical Society fits. In 1811 he sold his earlier house near the meeting house. Locke, born in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire in 1772 and a Dartmouth graduate, had practiced law in Billerica since 1801; he became a justice of the Court of Common Pleas, chief justice of the county Court of Sessions and a member of the Governor's Council, and in 1833 moved to Lowell as judge of its police court (Hazen).

Locke kept the house two years after leaving town. On March 26, 1835 he sold it "with all the buildings thereon" to George Bacon, yeoman, for $2,500, with ten acres of pasture and a wall pew in the meeting house, taking back a $2,000 mortgage. The deed already reserved "the right of W. Bowers to have his drain to the cellar empty on to the land as heretofore," a right that was repeated in every deed for the next fifty years. Bacon sold in June 1838 to Justin Smith, a Newburyport merchant, for $4,000, and Smith resold in December 1838 to Joel Richardson for $3,500.

Joel Richardson died in 1849. His will left the house to his widow Susan for as long as she remained his widow, and then to the Boston lawyers William Minot and William Minot Jr. as trustees for his children; she was still living there in 1871. In 1872 the trustees sold the place to Albert R. Richardson for $3,925. Richardson sold it in October 1874 for $6,000 to Emma J. Dix of Chicago, wife of Joel H. Dix, taking a $5,000 mortgage; the dormers and piazza that MACRIS dates to about 1875 belong to the Dix years. By 1882 Mrs. Dix had died, Joel H. Dix had made an assignment of his property to Addison G. Proctor of Chicago, and Proctor quitclaimed the house back to Richardson, who still held $3,300 of the mortgage.

On April 1, 1885 Richardson sold the house for $5,000 to George E. Stearns 2d, who opened it as a hotel. A lease of April 1896 to Charles A. Holt lists the "Stearns House" furnishings room by room: four attic chambers and ten numbered chambers, a parlor with a piano and a red plush sofa, a dining room with two extension tables, four square tables and twenty-four chairs, and a "Pool room" with a pool table, a cigar case and "one Archer barber chair." Holt also took a five-year option to buy "the hotel property in Billerica Centre known as the 'Stearns House' comprising about three acres" for $10,000, which he never used. When electric trolley lines met in the Centre, a small The Waiting Room stood on the River Street corner of the lawn (1902-1930). By 1910 Stearns was living in Boston and renting the house. In 1915 the town took a 75 by 90 foot lot from the River Street side "for the purpose of erecting thereon an engine house," but never built it, and in 1924 a town meeting voted to give the lot back for one dollar.

George E. Stearns died before 1924, and in January of that year his widow, Datie Louise Stearns, conveyed the property to Dr. A. Warren Stearns, the psychiatrist and later dean of Tufts Medical School. Their 1928 survey shows 80,877 square feet with the house and a garage, and in 1940 Dr. Stearns added the small lot to the west on River Street, the site of the old Universalist church and district school. He died in 1959. His widow Frances gave the property in 1963 to their son Charles E. Stearns, later a dean at Tufts and chairman of the Billerica Historical Commission. In 1972 he divided it: the house kept lot A-1 on the corner, and on lot B-1 along River Street he set the Samuel Ruggles House, moved there that year to save it. He sold the house lot, 57,059 square feet, in 1992 to private owners, who still hold it. In 2022 the town took easements along the Boston Road frontage for the reconstruction of Route 3A.

Locke sold the house in 1835, and two owners came between him and Joel Richardson; the Dixes who owned it from 1874 to 1882 were Emma J. and Joel H. Dix of Chicago; and A. Warren Stearns received the house from his father's widow in 1924. "Dr. Buck," whom MACRIS places here, appears in no deed of this lot; Dr. Maurice S. Buck bought the nearby Samuel Ruggles House in 1922.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.52
2. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883): Genealogical Register, LOCKE, Joseph (born Fitzwilliam 1772, law practice 1801-33, Lowell police court) and BOWERS (Jonathan and Dorcas Bowers); legal profession list.

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.