Manning Road

Location	Map
Laid Out	1831
Right of Way	45 - 50 ft
Pavement	20 - 30 ft

Manning Road runs west from Lexington Road in South Billerica, across the Middlesex Turnpike, to a dead end at Route 3. Until the 1950s it continued west to Springs Road near the Bedford line; that western end, now cut off by Route 3, is Orchard Road. No laying out has been found, but it is one of the old ways that the town said in 2016 were shown on the official town map of 1831, and the town's records give its acceptance as a town way at the town meeting of March 15, 1886. The Seth Crosby house, a square Federal house of about 1810, stood at its corner with the Turnpike until 1974.

The name Manning road was already in use by 1886, when D. L. Mason was paid for "cutting brush on Manning road," and it appears in the highway accounts of the next several years. The street naming committee chosen in 1896 (Martin Conway, John E. Rowell and Coburn S. Smith) listed "Manning street, running westerly from Lexington street to Bedford street, So. Billerica," and the Billerica Historical Society's revised list, accepted at the annual town meeting of March 27, 1899, gave "Manning road, from Lexington road running westerly to Spring street, So. Billerica." Neither report explains the name, and the origin has not been found. The Manning family was one of the largest in Billerica, but its homesteads were at the Center and on the Chelmsford road, and no Manning household on this road has been identified.

The road was rough and hilly. In 1896 the highway surveyor "blasted out stone on the Manning Road, laid over a number of culverts and patched up in other places," and it was graveled for 2,500 feet in 1917. In 1920 the town was asked for $300 "for laying out and widening Manning road from the Corner of Spring lane to a point known as Eliot street, a distance of about 600 feet." From the 1920s the highway reports treated it in two parts: the west end, from Spring Street to Elliot Street which led north to the boat house of the Nuttings Lake South Side Improvement Association, and the east end, from the Turnpike to Lexington Road. The west end was rolled, oiled and sanded in 1937 and oiled again in 1940 and 1941, and the east end was given a tar prime and an asphalt seal from Lexington Road to the Turnpike in 1945. In 1947 the town voted $1,000 "to make the part of Manning Road between Turnpike Road and Elliot Street safe for travel."

The relocation of U.S. Route 3 in the early 1950s cut across the road west of the Turnpike, and a three-span steel bridge built in 1953 carried Manning Road over the new highway. That bridge has since been demolished; the state's layout of 2002 for the widening of Route 3 refers to "Old Manning Rd." Manning Road now ends east of Route 3, and the old west end beyond the highway is called Orchard Road. A new layout of the western part of Manning Road, from Fortune Drive to Route 3, about 1,400 feet, was accepted as a public way at the annual town meeting of May 2003. The town's list of 2016 placed both Manning Road, from Lexington Road to its dead end, and Orchard Road, from the Bedford line to the bridge over Route 3, among the roads on the 1831 map already accepted, each with the date March 15, 1886.

Historic Buildings

Name	Alternate	Address	Built	Moved	Demolished
Seth Crosby House		11 Manning Rd	1810		1974

Manning Road

Manning Road

Historic Buildings

References