Nuttings Lake

Nuttings Lake, long called Nutting's Pond, lies in the southern part of Billerica, on the high ground between the Concord and Shawsheen Rivers. Hazen described it as "the picturesque Nutting's Pond, with Indian Hill on its northern side." It is a great pond of 67 acres, the larger of the two great ponds in Billerica (the other is Winning Pond, of 22 acres), and shallow, about four feet deep on average and eight at most. The lake lies in the Concord River watershed: its outlet is Mill Brook, which runs westerly from the lake, passes under Route 3 and under Dudley Road near Concord Road, where Capt. John Stearns had a mill about 1680, and reaches the Concord River. Since about 1810 the Middlesex Turnpike has crossed it on the Nuttings Lake Causeway, which divides it into two basins.

The pond had its name from the first years of the town. In May 1665 the town granted Henry Jefts "four acres of land, lying at the Indian Hill on the north of ye Indian field at Nuttins pond," and that December the bounds of land he had "purchased of the Indians at Indian Hill by the pond" were run, the south line being "the pond." Hazen took this to show that "the north shore of Nutting's Pond was so distinctively theirs as to be sold by them in 1665." The line of the Dudley farm, the first great grant in the south of the town, crossed "Nutting's Pond near its west end." No Nutting family appears among the early settlers in Hazen's register, and the source of the name is not recorded. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Crosby, Fiske and Jefts families had farms around it, and in 1806 the turnpike company was allowed to change its route to run "from a point in Bedford, crossing Nutting's Pond."

The pond was still farm and woodland country at the start of the twentieth century; the town paid in 1904 for "conveying fish to Nutting Pond," and the Davis Ice Company had a stable there in 1915. In 1910 the shores were cut into cottage lots on the Nuttings Lake Park plans drawn by C. A. Thayer, with extensions in 1912 and 1914, and with the summer colony the name changed: "Nutting's Lake" first appears in the town reports in 1916, and by the early 1920s it had replaced "Nutting's Pond." By 1920 the Nuttings Lake South Side Improvement Association had a boat house on the south shore. The cottages became year-round homes, and the town studied a water system for the section in 1932, contracted with the private Nuttings Lake Water Company in 1936, and after a special town meeting took thirteen streets "for Highway and Water purposes" in 1946, laid its own mains there. During the Second World War the Aircraft Warning Service ran Observation Post No. 268 at the lake around the clock from January 8, 1942. A new school for the neighborhood was built on land taken on Lexington Road in 1955; planned as the Nuttings Lake School, it opened in the fall of 1957 as the Eugene C. Vining School, named for Eugene C. Vining, who had been in the Billerica schools since 1915 and was long the superintendent. The Vining School closed in 2019, when the new Billerica Memorial High School opened and its pupils moved to the Ditson School, and the building was torn down about 2021. The post office for the neighborhood was called Nutting Lake.

The town voted in 1941 to ask the state to close the lake to fishing for three years and to dam or screen its outlet so that the fish stocked in it would stay. A by-law of 1962 kept outside motorboats off the lake and required boats towing water skiers to circle "counter clockwise ... about either of the two sections of Nuttings Lake." Today only electric motors are allowed on the lake. As the shores filled with houses the lake grew choked with weeds and algae, and from 1963 the town argued each year over money to treat it. In 1972 town meeting asked the state Division of Waterways to study "removing the fertility of Nuttings Lake by dredging," and in 1974 it voted 0,000 toward the study.

The Conservation Commission then made the lake its largest project. In 1977 it began work on the Nutting Lake Water Quality Restoration Project, a program of more than 32,000 funded half by a "clean lakes" grant from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, with dredging of the lake bottom, a disposal site for the dredged spoil, street sweeping, water quality monitoring and the purchase of land draining into the west basin. The spoil was pumped to the Martina Gage lot of the Town Forest at the lake's outlet, where a containment area was finished in 1978. Dredging went on with a MUDCAT dredge into the early 1980s, the project was officially completed in December 1985, and the commission called it "the biggest project in the history of the Commission." The same years produced a town beach: the annual town meeting of 1984 authorized the commission to build "a Town Beach at Nutting Lake with associated comfort station, parking, etc.," and by 1991 the Recreation Department was running the Nicola Micozzi Beach at Nutting Lake, named for Nicola Micozzi, the conservation commissioner who had reported on the dredging plans from 1973 and moved the beach article in 1984.