Joseph Noyes House

The J. Noyes House of the 1853 Walling map stood on the east side of the Boston road about a mile south of Billerica Common, on an eleven-acre lot long known as "the Carr Place". Every deed from 1846 to 1944 gives the same bounds: westerly on the Boston road, southerly by land of Oliver Crosby, easterly by land of Joseph White, and northerly by land of Harvey Crosby. The present house at 614 Boston Road, built about 1962, stands on Lot 2 of the 1957 division of that land.

The name "Carr place" was already in use when the first deed of it that has been found was written. In September 1846 Thomas J. Hunt of Mendon, Vermont, sold the place to Abel Hunt of Billerica for $1,025 as "a tract or parcel of land situate in said Billerica with a dwelling house thereon called the Carr place containing eleven acres", bounded from a stake "about one foot from the southerly corner of the garden lot in front of said house". A Walter Carr is on the Billerica tax list in 1788, and Walter and Joseph Carr owned several small lots in town in the 1810s and 1820s, but none of the Carr deeds read so far describes these eleven acres. Abel Hunt mortgaged it to Marshall Preston and in 1849 sold it to Thomas J. Jenkins, a butcher.

On April 11, 1850, Jenkins sold the place, "with a dwelling house and barn thereon", to Joseph Noyes of Billerica, yeoman, for $1,650. Noyes is the "J. Noyes" of the 1853 map. He died there intestate on August 12, 1868, leaving his widow Nancy and nine children, among them Joseph T. Noyes, then in Madura, India; his daughter Nancy G. Noyes, "the only next of kin in this country", administered the estate (Middlesex probate 38508). In 1868 and 1871 the heirs quitclaimed their ninths to their mother, "with the buildings and other improvements thereon".

Nancy Noyes sold the Carr Place in April 1870 to Patrick McAteer, a Boston plumber, for $3,000, still "with a dwelling house and barn thereon", and took back a $1,000 mortgage. McAteer defaulted, and on November 22, 1873, the place was sold at auction on the premises for $600; it came back to Nancy Noyes, by then living in Chelsea, who sold it in January 1874 to her neighbor Haslet Mackay for $700. Neither the foreclosure deed nor the sale to Mackay mentions any building, and none of the later deeds does either, so the Noyes house seems to have been gone by about 1873.

The eleven acres then stayed in use as open land attached to farms across the road. Mackay conveyed them with his homestead to Edward B. Haskell (deed dated 1884); Haskell sold the Carr Place to George H. Moore in 1913, and Moore to John E. Farmer in 1917. After Farmer's death his heirs released it in 1944 to Bertha B. Farmer. In January 1957 she had the road front surveyed into five house lots (Plan Book 89, Plan 75), and in April 1959 she sold Lot 2, 1.6 acres, as bare land to Donald T. Grappi and John P. Mullen of Winchester. Their firm, Parkview Builders Co. Inc., sold the lot in November 1959, and the present ranch house was built on it; it has since passed through a series of private owners.

References

1. Billerica assessor, parcel 70-12-0, 614 Boston Rd: Lot 2 Plan 89-75, 1.6 acres, house built about 1962

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.