Pelham Street

Location	Map
Neighborhood	Rio Vista
Laid Out	1928
Right of Way	50 ft
Pavement	29 ft

Pelham Street is a street of the Rio Vista section in the northwest part of town, near the Concord River between Nashua Road and Treble Cove Road. It was laid out on the plan of "Rio Vista, Billerica, Mass.," dated June 4, 1928 and drawn by George H. Wetherbee Jr., civil engineer, of Boston and Braintree, which was recorded on August 9, 1928 in Plan Book 52 Plan 58. On that plan Pelham Street runs along the high ground above the river near Colby, Hillcrest and Thoreau Streets. The Rio Vista ("river view") development was large; the school committee noted in 1929 that, unlike the summer colonies at River Pines and Shawsheen Pines, "much of the new building that is taking place there will house year-round residences."

The plan gives no reason for the name. Many of the Rio Vista streets were named for places or writers, such as Thoreau and Walden Streets for the Concord author who wrote of the Concord River; Pelham may come from the neighboring town of Pelham, New Hampshire, but no record says so. There was no road here before 1928.

The streets of Rio Vista remained private gravel ways for decades. A new section of Pelham Street was built under the town's subdivision rules after the Rio Vista Subdivision Plan of July 1964 (Plan Book 100 Plan 174), and attempts followed to accept the older part. In 1975 the town meeting voted down a motion to accept a way "from the end of the layout of Pelham Street" through Thoreau, Larchwood, Foster and Hillcrest Streets to Nashua Road, 2,525 feet in all; the street acceptance committee estimated that $64,300 was needed for water, grading, surfacing and drainage. Pelham Street was dismissed again at the fall town meeting of October 14, 1980, and the same layout article was dismissed in 1988. No later acceptance of Pelham Street has been found, though Liberty Drive, which runs south from it, was accepted in 2012.

Pelham Street

Pelham Street

References