Person

Joshua B. Holden

Joshua Bennett Holden (1850 to 1910) was the grandson and namesake of the Boston distiller Joshua Bennett and the owner from 1865 to 1892 of the Bennett homestead on Boston Road, which he made into the mansion known as Bennett Hall. He was the son of George Holden of Boston and Ellen Bennett (1816 to 1896), the elder daughter of Joshua and Eleanor (Richardson) Bennett. His aunt Rebecca was the wife of William Wilkins Warren, and his sister was the mother of George Holden Tinkham (1870 to 1956), the Boston congressman.

Joshua Bennett died without a will in August 1865. On December 12, 1865 his daughters, Ellen B. Holden and Rebecca B. Warren, and their husbands gave the farm, "mansion house and buildings ... formerly the homestead of the said Joshua Bennett" to his grandson, reserving to the widow Eleanor the use of it for her life; she lived there until her death in 1891. When Mrs. Bennett built the Bennett Public Library in 1880, Hazen recorded that the front of the building was "enriched by a fine rose-window, the gift of Mr. Joshua Holden."

About 1890 Holden remodeled and enlarged the old house into the mansion called Bennett Hall, "whose halls have witnessed many an unrecorded political conclave"; according to the Billerica magazine of 1912, Curtis Guild and John L. Bates dined and "discussed probabilities" there before they became governors. The estate also took in the land west of the road down to the Concord River. On March 5, 1892 he gave the estate to his son, Joshua Bennett Holden Jr., the great-grandson of Joshua Bennett, who kept it until 1924. In 1898 he published, for distribution, the paper "Old Families of the First Parish, Billerica" that Martha Hill Sage read at the centennial of the First Parish Church, and at the town meeting of 1900 the town thanked J. Nelson Parker, Frederick S. Clark and Joshua B. Holden for placing a suitable stone on the graves of Mary and Fanny Bowers, the donors of the Bowers Fund.

Joshua B. Holden

Joshua B. Holden

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