Peggy Hannon-Rizza Recreation Complex

Lampson Memorial Field is the town football field off Campbell Road, south of Concord Road in Billerica Center. It is the oldest part of the town recreation grounds now called the Peggy Hannon-Rizza Recreation Complex (addressed as 1 Ed Hayes Way and 20 Campbell Road), which also has softball and practice fields, tennis and pickleball courts, a basketball court, a playground and the old field house. The town accepted the land in 1950 as the Memorial Athletic Field, usually shortened to Memorial Field, and by 1973 it was styled the Charles E. Lampson Memorial Field, after the longtime Howe High School football coach Chuck Lampson. The 1950 Memorial Field and the later Lampson Field are the same ground.

The land was once part of the "Shed place", a farm of about fifty-six acres "about half a mile southerly of the meeting house" on the road from Billerica to Concord, bounded by the lane to the Isaac French place, the land of Samuel Whiting and the Stickney farm. In April 1823 Luther French sold "one undivided half" of it, "with all the buildings thereon, commonly called the Shed place", for $685 to William, Mary and Fanny Bowers, children of Dr. William Bowers of the Old Providence House; in 1824 Josiah Crosby released a mortgage that French had given on the farm in 1819, and William Bowers later passed his share to his sisters. The unmarried Bowers sisters left their property to charity. Priscilla Bowers's will gave her estate, including "1/18 of Shed farm", to the Baptist church, and Mary and Fanny Bowers left theirs to the town "for the benefit of the poor", the beginning of the town's Bowers Fund. On May 31, 1871 the First Baptist Church and Society sold its eighteenth part of the "Shed place" to Charles E. Gorham for $119.44, and the town, through a committee of Dudley Foster, Israel A. Colson and David L. Mason, sold him the other seventeen eighteenths, 49 acres "with an old house thereon", for $2,330.56. Gorham sold the farm to Dudley Foster in May 1887 for $50 and the mortgages on it, and two weeks later Foster sold it for $1,500 to Moses Campbell Mitchell, who moved his boys' school to these grounds after its building at the Center burned in 1888 (see Mitchell Boys' School).

After Mitchell's death his widow, Mary H. Mitchell, had the land surveyed by R. M. Jacobs as "Mitchell Estates" in 1935 (Plan Book 59, Plan 16), with house lots on Concord Road and Campbell Road and paper streets behind them. In November 1935 she deeded the land east of a dividing line to her son Alexander H. Mitchell and the western part, with the school buildings, to the Mitchell School corporation, subject to a $20,000 mortgage to Anna Zisman that was assigned to Blanche S. Mitchell in 1939. The school's main building burned in 1935 and the school closed during the war. In April 1947 Blanche S. Mitchell sold four blocks of the plan to John F. Poole of Boston, and in August 1948 Poole conveyed them, and Blanche Mitchell conveyed a fifth block, to three Billerica men, Thomas S. Taylor, Roger H. Hildreth and Austin F. Perry. The Mitchell School corporation quitclaimed all its Mitchell Estates land to Blanche Mitchell at the same time. The lots ran from Stuart Road east to a stone wall on the Mason land, and the northern block was bounded "by the shore of a pond".

Taylor, Hildreth and Perry built an athletic field there and gave it to the town. The town meeting of February 11, 1950 voted under Article 13 to "accept a deed of the Athletic Field and land adjacent thereto located on the Mitchell Estates, together with bleacher seats", on condition that it be run by a commission of three appointed by the moderator and "be used solely for athletic activities of the Town, preference and priority to be given to the High School athletics", with admission charges allowed. The town could still sell it "free and clear of all conditions" by a later vote. Article 14 raised $3,500 for a fence and equipment for the "Memorial Athletic Field". The moderator named Roger W. Hildreth, Thomas Taylor and William E. Eggo as the first Memorial Athletic Field Commission. The deed, dated August 3, 1950, was recorded on August 14 (Book 1148, Page 432). Some accounts say the town bought the sports fields in 1948; the 1948 purchase was by the three townsmen, and the town received the field by their deed in 1950.

One of the two portable classrooms removed from the Ditson School went to the commission in 1950 as a field house, and the school report for 1950 said that "with the new Memorial Field now in operation, we have an athletic plant the equal of any in neighboring towns". The 1951 season was the first in which Howe High School played its football games there, and under Coach Lampson the 1952 team went undefeated and won the state Class D championship. In 1952 the town voted $3,500 from the Gray Street Bridge account for a permanent field house. William Eggo chaired the commission through the 1950s, with Arthur Barnard and Thomas O'Neill and later Maurice Ellis and Wesley Spaulding, and the field was rented out for other events. In 1960 the town meeting put Memorial Field under the Park Department.

The Recreation Commission concentrated on the field after 1969. The 1970 town meeting voted, 139 to 1, to buy or take by eminent domain lots of the Mitchell Estates plan next to the field for parking, and the Billerica Hockey Association turned the field house back to the town. An access road to Glad Valley Drive was built in 1971. High school football was played at Memorial Field for the last time in 1972 before moving to the Marshall School, and the 1973 town meeting voted $10,000 to light "the football field at the Charles E. Lampson Memorial Field" for night games, which the Pop Warner league used. In 1975 the Park Department cleared woods at the "Chuck Lampson Memorial Football Field" on Campbell Road for a girls' softball field and eight tennis courts, four of them lighted. A toddler playground, a clay infield, a basketball court and an electronic scoreboard followed between 1978 and 1982, the field house was being fitted up as a summer office for the Recreation Department in 1985, and in 1986 the football field was resodded and given an irrigation system.

In 2013 the recreation complex at Campbell Road and Ed Hayes Way was formally dedicated to Peggy Hannon-Rizza, the longtime recreation director. A state PARC grant of $400,000 in 2017 paid for court and parking lights, fencing and an accessible shade shelter, with a trail planned around the abutting ponds, and the fields were redesigned and rebuilt with Community Preservation and borrowed funds from 2019, the complex being scheduled to reopen in the spring of 2022. The town meeting of 2017 described the land as held by the Town "under the custody of the Recreation Commission as land dedicated to active Parks and Recreation". The football field keeps the Lampson name.