Lt. John Stearns House

The Lt. John Stearns House stands on the west side of Dudley Road in South Billerica, on a farm that runs down to the Concord River and the Great Meadows. It is the northernmost of the three Stearns houses in the Two Brothers Rocks-Dudley Road Historic District, with the Captain John Stearns House and the Abner Stearns House to the south, and for most of the twentieth century it was the administration building of the Maryknoll novitiate and then of the Daughters of St. Paul.

The land is part of the south-west corner of the Dudley Farm. In 1665 James Parker of Groton sold the first John Stearns several lots there, "a part of the farme purchased of Thomas Dudly Esqr decd," reaching west to "the river." His son, Capt. John Stearns, settled on it, and in February 1728 gave his son, Lt. John Stearns (1686-1776), "The place ... That I now Dwell upon Containing about two Hundred and Fifty acres ... with all The Buildings," to take effect after his death. Lt. John lived at that older homestead, the house now called the Captain John Stearns House. In 1752 he gave it to his son Isaac Stearns, and on Oct. 23, 1761 he sold Isaac for one hundred pounds a second tract of about one hundred acres "on the East Side of Concord River," running from a ditch at the river east along Jonathan Hill's land and south to Isaac's own farm, "but not to come into possession ... till after my Decease." That tract is this farm. The deed names no buildings.

Isaac Stearns came into the land when his father died in 1776 and held both farms until his own death in 1808. His will left "one half of all my Lands and Buildings in Billerica" to each of his sons Timothy and John, each half "including what he already has a Deed of." On Jan. 31, 1810 the brothers divided the farm: Timothy quitclaimed to John about ninety-four acres bounded east by Job Hill, north by Jonathan Hill, west by the Concord River and south by Timothy's part, "with the building thereon." That is the first record of the house. The MACRIS inventory dates it to about 1715, reasoning from the birth of Lt. John's first child, but the deeds do not support that date; interviews with Sally Lane Stearns in the Boston Globe in 1890 and 1891 and a 1901 Stearns genealogy point instead to Isaac Stearns or to his son John Stearns (1765-1836), and the National Register nomination calls the house mid-eighteenth century.

John Stearns married Mary Lane of Bedford in 1801 and later lived in Woburn, where he was killed by a train in 1836. His will left the residue of his estate to his eldest son, Franklin Stearns, and the inventory of January 1837 lists the "Homestead ... containing ninety five acres with the Buildings thereon" at $2,200, with a cider mill among the tools. Among Franklin's brothers were John Owen Stearns, superintendent of the Central Railroad of New Jersey, and Onslow Stearns, governor of New Hampshire from 1869 to 1871. Franklin Stearns (1802-1886) and his wife Sally Lane farmed here all their lives; he made no recorded sale of the farm. After his death his widow and children sold William H. Marston one acre with a house at the corner of the road to Bedford (1886), and his son John Billings Stearns took the farm under his father's will, adding a twenty-stall dairy barn in the 1890s. The 1901 plan of his estate by Pierce and Barnes shows the house and its long barns on the west side of Chestnut Street (as Dudley Road was then called), with 66 acres of grass land, pasture, orchard, woods and meadow down to the river and another 17 acres of tillage across the road.

On Jan. 12, 1911 John B. Stearns sold "the 'Stearns Farm'," 65.3 acres "with the buildings thereon," to E. Geraldine Harrison of Boston, "For my title see will of Franklin Stearns," ending some 250 years of Stearns ownership; he kept the field east of the road. Harrison mortgaged the farm to the Liberty Trust Company for $20,000 in 1920 and lost it to foreclosure in July 1921, when the bank sold it to Thomas M. Smith of Braintree for $10,000. Smith sold it to Jacob J. Yonkers in 1923, Yonkers to Gabe Rosen in April 1924, and in May 1924 John B. Stearns sold Rosen the 15.2-acre field across the road. Rosen conveyed both to Leslie R. Brown of Watertown, and on June 19, 1924 Brown conveyed them to Edward J. O'Connell of Newton, who on Sept. 10, 1924 deeded the farm to the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Boston. William Henry O'Connell used it for St. John's Seminary, and on Jan. 9, 1933 the Archbishop conveyed "the Stearns Farm" to the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers. Maryknoll turned the dairy barns into a novitiate with a chapel and dormitory, designed by Maginnis and Walsh, and kept the old house as its administration building; the first thirty novices arrived in November 1933.

In 1964 Maryknoll sold about eighteen acres along the river to the United States for the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge and conveyed the rest of the farm, with the house and novitiate, to the Daughters of St. Paul, who used it as St. Thecla's Retreat House. They replaced the converted barns with a brick convent complex dedicated in 1980, keeping the Stearns farmhouse, and a 1987 plan set the property off as Lot A of about 41 acres. In 2017 the Daughters of St. Paul, Inc. conveyed it to the Daughters of St. Paul Religious Trust. The house was listed on the National Register in 2010 as part of the Two Brothers Rocks-Dudley Road Historic District.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.184

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.