Pemberton Academy

Pemberton Academy was Billerica's first private academy, kept from about 1797 to 1808 by Ebenezer Pemberton (1746-1835) on a quarter acre of land on the west side of the Boston road, a little north of the meetinghouse, at the south end of what is now 349 Boston Road. Pemberton, a nephew of the Boston divine Rev. Ebenezer Pemberton, graduated from the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1765 and taught at Princeton, where Aaron Burr was among his pupils, before succeeding Eliphalet Pearson in 1786 as principal of Phillips Academy in Andover. He came from Andover to Billerica in 1794. Hazen's History (1883) puts his school "at the place where the late Dr. Pillsbury lived" and describes it as a one-story building which received additions as more room was needed, until "its length became a marked feature." It numbered at times sixty pupils, many of whom went on to Harvard; girls as well as boys were later admitted, and Deacon Samuel Whiting taught mathematics. John Farmer's memoir of Billerica (1816) says the building was "erected in this town" in 1797, partly with "the donation of individuals," that the academy opened the following winter, and that it "discontinued in the autumn of 1808."

The deeds show where it stood. The land was part of the 32-acre house lot granted to Thomas Hubbard and sold with "one dwelling house" to Samuel Manning in 1666 (see Samuel Manning Homestead); it passed to Benjamin Heywood in 1710, to William Stickney in 1728, to Dr. Isaac Hurd in 1786, and in 1794 to Isaac Wilkins of Billerica, merchant. On November 11, 1796, Wilkins sold Pemberton for $40 "a certain peice of land" beginning "at a stake and stones at the road being Deacon Joshua Abbots northeast corner," a square of six and four-tenths rods on each side: the southeast corner of the farm, on the road at the Abbott line. When Wilkins sold the rest of the farm to Robert Caldwell of Boston in 1800, he excepted "the quarter acre" sold to Pemberton. Pemberton himself lived nearby on a separate lot: in 1800 he bought from Timothy Foster six acres running from the road to Concord River on the north side of the Caldwell farm, with half of the buildings the Cragins had bought from Wilkins, and he mortgaged that lot to Eliphalet Pearson, his predecessor at Andover, in 1806.

After the school closed, Pemberton mortgaged the academy lot on July 4, 1809 to his assistant Samuel Whiting for $430: "a small peice of land ... bounded on the west and north by land belonging to the heirs of [Robert] Caldwell, on the east by the public highway leading to Amherst in Newhampshire, on the south by land lately belonging to Joshua Abbot deceased, containing one quarter of an acre more or less with the buildings thereon." Pemberton later moved to Boston, where he spent his last years and died on June 25, 1835; in 1827, as "Ebenezer Pemberton of Boston," he sold his six-acre house lot to John and Henry Baldwin. No later recorded deed of the academy lot has been found, either from Pemberton or from Whiting, but by 1839 the quarter acre had been absorbed back into the Caldwell farm. Robert Caldwell had left everything to his widow Frances by his will of 1804, and when she died in 1839 her executor Joseph Locke sold "the homestead of the said late Mrs Caldwell," about 37 acres beginning at the road at John Foster's land (the old Abbott line), with no exception for the academy corner, to John Baldwin, Francis Faulkner, James R. Faulkner and John Baldwin Jr. for $2,200. The academy building is not mentioned again; Farmer's memoir already spoke of the school in the past tense in 1816.

The land then followed the farm: to Stephen and Caroline Parker in 1842, to Dr. Harlin Pillsbury in 1871 (the "late Dr. Pillsbury" of Hazen's account), and through several owners to John E. Woodside in 1905 and Forrest W. and Etta A. Todd in 1941, whose Todd farm it remained for half a century. The Todds sold a house lot at the north end of the road frontage in 1954 (347 Boston Road); the south end, where the academy stood, stayed with the farmhouse. In 1994 the Todd heirs sold the farm to Allen-Todd, Inc., which laid out the Todd Estates subdivision and Todd Lane (Plan Book 185, Plan 105); the academy site is within Lot A, the 1886 farmhouse lot at 349 Boston Road (see Dr. Harlin Pillsbury House).

Several later accounts say Pemberton kept his academy for about twenty years. The deeds and Farmer's contemporary memoir point instead to about eleven years of teaching in the building (1797 to 1808), within the fourteen years Pemberton lived in Billerica after leaving Andover in 1794. Billerica had no academy again until the Billerica Academy opened in 1820.

References

1. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883): Pemberton Academy (schools chapter) and Genealogical Register, Pemberton 2

Title References Expand all

Recorded is Book/Page at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds unless noted; Probate # is a Middlesex probate case, Ctf a Land Court certificate of title.