Mill Brook

Mill Brook is the outlet of Nuttings Lake and runs southwest across South Billerica to the Concord River. It leaves the west end of the lake, passes under Route 3 on the Route 3 Mill Brook Culvert, and widens into Hill's Millpond beside Concord Road at the Jonathan Hill House. Below Concord Road it runs through wet meadow near Adams Street, takes in Buehler Brook from Bedford, and passes under Dudley Road about an eighth of a mile from the river. For its last stretch the centre of the brook is the line between Billerica and Bedford. It is one of several streams called Mill Brook in the local records: Content Brook in East Billerica was "the mill Brooke" in 1663 and Mill Brook again in the town reports of the 1940s, and a brook of the same name ran at the Chelmsford line in West Billerica.

The brook takes its name from two old mill sites. Near the river it crossed the south end of the Dudley Farm, where John Stearns settled late in the seventeenth century and, by family tradition, built the Captain John Stearns House facing the brook in 1689. He is said to have started a saw mill on the brook about 1680. His son Lt. John Stearns ran the mill after him, and when he divided the farm in 1752 he gave Isaac Stearns the land north of the brook and Edward Stearns the land south of it, keeping for himself the right "to pass and repass to the saw mill" and to flow the meadows at the usual times. In February 1767, on Edward's petition, the General Court set off his Billerica land to Bedford, so that the town line came to run south of the mill and down the brook to the river; a small witness boulder marked with the letter B still stands on the southeast bank, about eight feet from the line.

The Stearns mill lasted more than two centuries. Abner Stearns bought five acres from his uncle Isaac in 1796, bounded south by the brook and east "along the east side of the mill dam," and built the brick Abner Stearns House; in 1818 he mortgaged sixteen acres "together with the dwelling house, sawmill, and outbuildings." His sons worked in the mill, and one of them, Edward H. Stearns, who ran it about 1838, went on to take out some thirty patents for saw mill machinery and to found the Stearns Manufacturing Company in Erie, Pennsylvania. In April 1841 the executors sold the homestead "with a dwelling house barn saw mill grist mill and out buildings" at auction to John C. Hobbs of Roxbury for $1,845, bounded south "by the Mill brook land used for a Mill yard." In the 1870s Seward S. Chase made shingles there; the 1870 valuation taxed him for a mill, an acre of land and the water power at $400. In 1888 Ellen R. Pickman, wife of Dudley L. Pickman, bought the one-acre mill privilege, and by 1890 the mill buildings were gone. When the Herricks sold her five more acres on the south bank in 1902 they kept "the exclusive possession and control of the by-pass or canal opening out of said brook easterly of the water wheel," and the state's boundary atlas of 1904 shows "Mr. Herrick's ice house" on the site, which stood until the 1930s. A stone-lined spillway, a granite overflow weir and a granite stringer bridge carrying Dudley Road survive at the Stearns Mill Site.

The second mill site was at Concord Road. Nathaniel Hill received the land there in 1663, and the first clear references to a mill on it date from about 1680. The Hill family kept the mill privilege after the farm was sold in 1825, and Jonathan Hill, who bought the mill and water power in 1835, carried on there the manufacture, begun soon after 1830, of the leather-splitting machine invented by Samuel Parker, which Hazen called "almost indispensable in the manufacture of leather." He sold the business to Charles H. Hill, who was doing $28,000 worth of work a year in 1875. Deeds of the 1860s describe the pond with an upper and a lower dam, the "machine shop" of C. H. Hill near the dam, and the brook running "past the upper dam to Nutting's Pond." In 1966 the Davis family sold the Jonathan Hill House with eleven acres, "including Mill Brook and the pond," to Honeywell Inc. for its industrial campus.

In the twentieth century the brook ran through woods and conservation land. The town forest of 1948 included fifty acres south of the lake that "follows the Nutting's Lake outlet to the Boston and Maine Bedford Branch." The relocated Route 3 crossed it in 1953 on a short concrete culvert, which was not replaced when the highway was widened in 2001 to 2005. In 1966 the Pickman heirs sold 392 acres in Bedford, Billerica and Carlisle to the federal government for the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, which took in the brook west of the Dudley Road bridge with the Stearns mill site. The town engineer reported in 1986 that "a new culvert is needed ... on Dudley Road at Mill Brook." Since 2010 the lower brook, its mill site and the Stearns farms have been part of the Two Brothers Rocks-Dudley Road Historic District on the National Register.

Deed References Expand all

Recorded is Book/Page at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds unless noted.

References

1. Two Brothers Rocks-Dudley Road Historic District, National Register nomination (2010): Mill Brook, the Stearns saw mill, the 1767 boundary change and the Stearns Mill Site
2. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883): Jonathan Hill's leather-splitting machine works in the south part of the town, sold to Charles H. Hill
3. Billerica town report 1948: town forest south of Nutting's Lake following the outlet to the Boston and Maine Bedford Branch
4. Billerica town report 1986: a new culvert needed on Dudley Road at Mill Brook
5. FHWA project profile: Route 3 North design-build-operate project (widening completed 2005)