Pinehurst Manor

Pinehurst Manor is a neighborhood of small house lots on the east side of Boston Road in Pinehurst, in the south part of town, between McHugh Avenue on the north and the line of the Pinedale Park Land Company on the south. The land was a farm of about 100 acres with buildings, running 2,602 feet along the great road from Billerica to Boston from a brook north to land of one Beard, and back to land of Gleason and Parker. Henry Shelden and James T. Eames had it surveyed by James A. Bancroft on Oct. 23, 1893 and sold it to Clara N. Wonson on Nov. 2, 1893; on Sept. 13, 1910 Clara N. Wonson, widow, of Billerica sold the whole tract to Frank W. Coughlin of Brookline.

Coughlin had it laid out at once. "Pinehurst Manor, Billerica, Mass., Owned by Frank W. Coughlin," drawn by H. A. Millhouse, civil engineer, of Boston in September 1910, was recorded on Sept. 23, 1910 (Plan Book 27, Plan 95). It divided the farm into well over a thousand lots, most of them 25 feet wide and 2,500 square feet, on a grid of 40 foot streets: Pinehurst Avenue, Cardington Avenue, Beaumont, Covington, Dorsett, Egmont and Chesterfield Avenues running east from Boston Road, crossed by Allandale, Ellingwood, Glenside, Ridgeway, Glenvale, Montrose and Endleigh Avenues, with Clarence, Delle, Bancroft and Dillworth Streets at the east end. The names were chosen for their English sound; several are British titles, and none refers to a Billerica family. Coughlin was selling lots the same way at Wilmington Gardens and Wilmington Manor, and three years later laid out Mechanics' Park on the Tewksbury line. The name came from Pinehurst Park, the trolley park on Boston Road at Cook Street.

The lots were bought slowly, often several at a time, and the streets stayed private ways for decades. A 1925 plan of electric light poles "on not accepted streets in Pinehurst Manor" (Plan Book 47, Plan 64) shows the same grid, "all streets 40 feet in width." The town accepted the first 1,000 feet of Pinehurst Avenue in 1924 and 800 feet of Cardington Avenue in 1927, laid water mains through the 1920s, and accepted the rest piece by piece; Ridgeway Avenue was not accepted until 1975. The plan's Allandale and Dorsett Avenues are now spelled Allendale and Dorset, and its Montrose Avenue is today's Shannon Road and Ernest Road.