Joshua Abbott House

An old farmhouse stood at 357 Boston Road, on the west side of the road a quarter mile north of the Common, where the mansard-roofed William F. Sanborn House now stands at the corner of La Salette Road. The 1973 Historical Commission survey of the Sanborn house noted that it was "built on the site of an older house, possibly Joshua Abbott 1727." The deeds bear that out, but they also show that the house was older than 1727: Joshua Abbott bought a farm that already had a house on it, and the lot itself was one of the first house lots of the town. The earliest record of a house here is the inventory of James Patterson's estate in 1701.

The land was the house lot of James Patterson, a Scot taken prisoner at the battle of Worcester in 1651, who settled here about 1658. His lot of "thirty and two acres" ran from the highway then called Long Street west to the Concord River, with John Baldwin to the south. In King Philip's War in 1675 Patterson's house was the most northerly of the town's garrison houses. Hazen placed it "near Mr. Sanborn's," and the deeds settle where: the farm to the north was Thomas Hubbard's grant, sold with its own dwelling house in 1666 and bounded "James Paterson south," so the Patterson Garrison stood on this lot. Whether the house that came down about 1869 was the garrison building itself the records do not say. He died on June 14, 1701, "aged about 68," and the inventory of his estate begins with "The Homestead 30 acres ... with the housing, orchard." A mortgage of the homestead in 1706 bounds it on the north by Samuel Manning's land and by "John Patersons Orchard," a small piece on the road held by another son. In 1707 his son Andrew, a tailor, sold "The Homested or house Lott" to John Wilson Jr., and in 1717 Wilson sold "one Certain Messuage or Tenement ... Containing Thirty and Two acres," with the buildings, to Ephraim Manning.

On June 29, 1727 Manning sold the same messuage, "as it was laid out to James Paterson in Billerica Town Book of Records," to Joshua Abbott for 350 pounds. Abbott, a cordwainer and for nearly thirty years the town clerk, gave the farm by deed to his son, Deacon Joshua Abbott Jr. (1722-1807), as his will of 1769 explains. The younger deacon lived here for most of his life. His only son died as a child, and when he died in 1807 he left the town a clock for the meetinghouse and a fund for teaching church music, and he divided "my homestead farm containing about thirty two acres, and half the buildings thereon" between his sister Dorcas Abbott and Joshua Kidder, a shoemaker. Kidder's inventory of 1808 locates the house exactly: "on the West side of and adjoining to the great road leading from the Meeting-house in said Billerica to the meeting house in Chelmsford, and about eighty rods north of said Billerica meeting-house."

For the next thirty years the "Deacon Joshua Abbot Place" changed hands often. Commissioners divided the farm between the two halves. John and Henry Baldwin bought Dorcas Abbott's half from her heirs in 1819 and sold it in 1820 to Simeon Jefts. In 1828 Jefts bought the Kidder half, "about twenty acres" and "half of the dwelling house where the said Jefts now lives," from John and Henry Baldwin, who had just bought it from Kidder's widow and her husband Phillip Bowers. In 1829 he sold the reunited farm back to the Baldwins. They sold it in 1831 to William Rogers Jr. In 1834 his guardian sold "the dwelling house barn and buildings" at auction to another Joshua Abbott, of East Sudbury and later Lowell, who was no relation of the deacons. On March 30, 1839 this Joshua Abbott sold the "Deacon Joshua Abbot Place" for $3,000 to John Foster of Boston.

Foster made it his home. He died in 1841, leaving his sister the use of "The Homestead Farm ... containing about 37 acres" for life and the rest to his nephews. By 1853, when the town map shows the name Foster here, it belonged to his nephew Levi T. Foster, a mill overseer, who died that year. In 1854 the administrator sold "the Homestead Farm of the late John Foster" at auction, and it passed quickly through Alden B. and Albert R. Richardson to Temple Paul, a housewright, in 1854. Paul sold it to Charles Hazelton, a mason, in 1855; Hazelton sold it to George P. Elliot in 1857; and Elliot sold it for $5,000 to Joseph L. Getchell of Lowell in 1865, each time with "the buildings thereon standing."

On Aug. 16, 1870 Getchell sold the farm for $2,500 to William F. Sanborn, a master mason, who replaced the old house with the present mansard-roofed house. Local sources date the new house to 1869, a year before the recorded deed, so the old house probably came down about 1869 or 1870. In 1884 Sanborn sold the Boston and Lowell Railroad a right of way across the farm for its Bedford and Billerica branch, asking for "a suitable grade crossing with gates at the lane running through my premises." His heirs sold the farm, still "forty acres," in 1907 to Jeremiah S. Mahoney. Mahoney left it by will to his sister Mary E. Reardon, and her heirs held it until 1956. That year Elizabeth P. and D. Fred Reardon sold it to the developer Francis A. Corcoran, who laid it out as Woodside Manor Estates, with La Salette and Corcoran roads. The Sanborn house was kept on Lot 23 at the corner of Boston Road, and it has been privately owned since.

References

1. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883): James Patterson's house lot and garrison (pp. 34, 114) and the Abbot, Foster and Patterson genealogies

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.