Lubbers Brook

Lubbers Brook rises in the north-east corner of East Billerica and flows into Wilmington, where it is the principal headwater of the Ipswich River. It belongs to the Ipswich River basin, while nearly all the rest of the town drains to the Merrimack through the Concord River and the Shawsheen River. Its head is in the woods near Pheasant Road; it runs north past Irene Avenue to Cook Street, crosses it, and continues north in the low ground toward Alexander Road, then turns east and crosses the town line into Wilmington. There it passes through Lubbers Pond and the site of the former Billerica-Wilmington airport near Aldrich Road, goes under the line of the old Middlesex Canal and the railroad, and turns south-east to join Maple Meadow Brook and form the Ipswich River. Much of its Billerica course is an intermittent stream.

The lower brook lay in old Billerica. The land east of the Shawsheen on the Wilmington side was part of the town until Wilmington was incorporated on September 25, 1730, when the farm of Abraham Jaquith, partly in Billerica, went to the new town, and in December 1737 the General Court annexed to Wilmington about six hundred acres more on the south-east side of the Shawsheen, the farms of the Beards, Jonathan Baldwin, Peter Cornell and Richard Hopkins, who had been worshipping at the Wilmington meeting house because it was two miles nearer. The origin of the name is not recorded; it was in use by the time the Middlesex Canal was built, about 1802, and the canal's aqueduct over the stream in Wilmington, whose abutments survive, is known as the Lubber's Brook (or Sinking Meadow) Aqueduct. Downstream in Wilmington a sawmill and grist mill was built on the brook about 1720, later known as Henry Harnden's mill.

In Billerica the brook appears in the town records mainly as a boundary. A zoning article of 1959 for land on Alexander Road, running from the Wilmington line "to the center line of Lubbers Brook" and on to Aldrich Road and Cook Street, was indefinitely postponed at the 1960 town meeting, and the same tract came back in the warrant of 1981 and was dismissed. In 1997 Town Meeting voted, 131 to 22, to rezone about twenty acres on Cook Street at the Wilmington line, bounded on one side by "Lubbers Avenue North," a street of an old plan named for the brook. When the town adopted the federal flood insurance rate map in 1985 it was said at Town Meeting that Jones Brook and Lubbers Brook were the only places the change would affect. The Wild and Scenic River Stewardship Council's report for 2001 lists Lubbers Brook among the streams watched by the Ipswich Headwaters Stream Team.

Lubbers Brook

Lubbers Brook

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