Lawrence Street
Lawrence Street
| Location | Map |
| Neighborhood | McElligott Subdivision |
| Laid Out | 1905 |
| Right of Way | 32 ft |
| Pavement | 18 ft |
Lawrence Street is a short street in North Billerica at the south end of Fayerweather Street (formerly Fairview Street), between High Street and Pollard Street. It was laid out as an unnamed forty-foot street on a "Plan of Land in Billerica, Mass., belonging to Lawrence A. Adlington," surveyed on April 12, 1915 by Smith and Brooks, civil engineers, of Lowell, and recorded in Plan Book 33 Plan 10 (dated Nov. 27, 1915). Adlington's land lay beyond the house lots that Michael H. McElligott and others had laid out in 1913 on Fairview and Prospect Streets, and his plan carried both of those streets on to the new cross street, with eleven lots in a row along its far side. The plan leaves the street unnamed, and the name it soon took is evidently Adlington's own first name.
The name is first found in 1925, when an article asked the town to accept "Fairview Street from High Street to Lawrence Street," and the directory of 1931 lists "Lawrence from Fairview easterly." Lawrence Street itself waited much longer. An article to accept "Lawrence Street, a distance of 250 feet easterly from Fairview Street, as a town way" lost at the annual meeting of March 10, 1951. A six-inch water main was laid on Prospect, Lawrence and Fairview Streets in 1970, and at the fall town meeting that began on Oct. 7, 1980 the town voted "to accept LAWRENCE STREET as a public way in accordance with the layout with the Board of Selectmen," a road "40' wide and approximately 320' long."
The street was partly resurfaced in 1988 and repaved in 2005. As the only Lawrence Street in town it kept its name through the renaming of duplicate street names in 1988 to 1991. It is not one of the roads of the 1831 town map accepted in 2016, and it came too late for the street lists of 1897 and 1899.