Pinehurst Fire Station (1955)

The Pinehurst Fire Station of 1955, the house of Engine Company 3 of the Billerica Fire Department, stood at 832 Boston Road on the southeast corner of Cardington Avenue in Pinehurst. The town bought the corner lot in 1953, built a two-door station on it in 1954 and 1955 for about $45,000, and opened it with permanent firemen on June 19, 1955. It served the south end of town for sixty-five years. In 2020 it was torn down so that the present Pinehurst Fire Station could be built on the same lot.

In 1953 the department had permanent men at two stations, the Central Station built in 1918 and the North Billerica station in Union Hall, which had been opened on a permanent basis on September 14, 1953. Pinehurst, laid out in house lots after 1900, had no station of its own. The warrant for the annual town meeting of March 7, 1953 asked for $4,600 to acquire "Lots 134 to 140 inclusive as described in a plan of Pinehurst Manor and located on Boston Road" for a fire station, by purchase or by eminent domain, and $1,000 for an architect's sketches. At the adjourned session of March 21, 1953 the town voted $4,500 from free cash to buy or take lots 134 to 137, "now or formerly owned by Marie Roy", and lots 138 to 140, "now or formerly owned by Charles F. Bruen". A motion to dismiss the article failed, and the main motion carried on a rising vote, 170 to 52. The town also voted $1,000 "for the purpose of securing complete plans and specifications." No taking was needed. On July 7, 1953 Marie Roy of Billerica, whose husband Arthur J. Roy released his rights, gave the town a quitclaim deed of all seven lots, 23,615 square feet bounded "Northerly by Cardington Street 140 feet" and "Westerly by Boston Road 175 feet more or less." The treasurer's accounts for 1953 show $4,500 paid for the "Purchase of Land for Fire Station, Pinehurst."

The annual town meeting of 1954 voted $45,000 under Article 50 for "constructing and equipping a fire station to be located at the corner of Cardington Avenue and Boston Road," and under Article 51 it named a Pinehurst Fire Station Committee with full authority to make the contracts: Paul Newman, Joseph Vocell, Fire Chief Paul H. Roper and Harry Waite. The building inspector issued a permit for a "New Fire Station" that year. In 1954 the committee paid $24,180 to the contractor, $1,110.44 in architect's fees and $108.15 for advertising, and at the end of the year Chief Roper reported that "construction is nearly completed on a new $45,000 two-door fire station in Precinct 3, Pinehurst, the location being at Boston Road and Cardington Avenue." The reports do not name the architect or the builder. Another $13,953.15 was paid in 1955, and the committee made its last payments in 1956 and 1957.

Construction was finished in June 1955, and the chief reported that the station "was opened and put into service with permanent men on June 19, 1955," with two permanent men on duty and a 200-gallon pumper lent from the Central Station. A new Mack 750-gallon pumping engine was delivered on September 9, 1955 and went into service at the Pinehurst Station as Engine 3 on September 12. A 1939 Mack combination brush fire truck, Engine 4, was also kept there. The selectmen wrote that "In the late spring the new Billerica Fire Station at Pinehurst was opened," the same spring the town celebrated its tercentenary. With permanent men at all three stations, the new station, a new aerial ladder and the new pumper, every part of town received lower fire insurance rates from the New England Fire Insurance Rating Association.

The station stood close to a busy state highway. The warrant for the 1956 town meeting asked for traffic control lights on Boston Road at the Pinehurst Fire Station, and in 1967 the town meeting debated fire pre-emption lights for the Center and Pinehurst stations. In 1959 the civil defense director put up a large siren at the station, with the federal government paying half its cost. Later warrants asked for a chain link fence around the station and new storm windows (1971), and the town put in new apparatus doors in 1985, refurbished the station in 1988 and installed a new gas heating system in 2008. By 1977 the Pinehurst Station also housed a 75-foot aerial ladder. In 2006 an emergency access road from Dunham Road Extension to Wildcrest Avenue gave the station a short way into the industrial park.

By then the station was too small for modern fire engines. In 2017 the town meeting voted $100,000 to study all of the town's fire stations, and in 2019 the Town Manager started two studies of a new station for Pinehurst, noting that "the current Pinehurst Station no longer serves the needs of a modern Fire Department," above all because it could not hold modern apparatus. At the fall town meeting of October 2019 the town voted, 171 to 4, to borrow $10,000,000 for the design and construction of "a new Fire Department Pinehurst Sub-Station Facility." On February 12, 2020 the Board of Appeals heard the town's engineers explain that they proposed "to take down the existing fire station and put up a more modern facility in the same location," and Fire Chief Robert Cole said that his predecessor, Chief Thomas Conway, had started the project about ten years before. The old station was demolished in 2020, at the start of construction of the new building.

The land was part of the farm of Francis Carter of Wilmington, who bought a half interest in about 230 acres on the road from Billerica to Boston from John Parker in 1818 and the rest from Ruel Carter in 1824, and held it until his death in 1867. His heirs sold the farm in 1889 to Henry Sheldon, James T. Eames and Kimball M. McLaughlin, and in 1893 Sheldon and Eames sold the western hundred acres, with "the dwelling house thereon", to Clara N. Wonson. On September 13, 1910 she sold the hundred acres to Frank W. Coughlin of Brookline, who had them laid out as Pinehurst Manor by the engineer H. A. Millhouse that month. Lots 134 to 140 formed the block at the southeast corner of Boston Road and Cardington Avenue in the Pinehurst Manor & Park View development.

Coughlin sold the corner lots, 138, 139 and 140, on January 10, 1911 to Peter and Ellen Dignan of Roxbury, and lots 134 and 135 in 1912 to Rose A. Canney of South Boston. In February 1914 he conveyed his unsold lots to James E. Burke of Lexington, trustee, who sold lots 136 and 137 on September 25, 1914 to Anna Eklind of Winthrop Highlands. None of these owners built on the land. Anna Eklind passed her lots in 1935 to Anna C. and Hilding Larson, who in 1946 described them as "a vacant lot of land" when they sold them to Charles Webber of Billerica. Ellen Dignan, by then a widow living at Centerville on Cape Cod, sold the corner lots in 1931 to Charles F. Bruen of Centerville. His taxes for 1940 went unpaid, and the collector sold the lots to the town in 1942 for $17.10; in 1946 the treasurer assigned the tax title to Richard H. Jollymore of Pinehurst for $80.72. Rose A. Canney, who conveyed her lots in 1948 under the name Rose Ann Donaghy, sold them in 1950 to Roy Brothers, Incorporated, of Billerica. On July 27, 1950 Roy Brothers, Charles Webber and Richard H. Jollymore each deeded their lots to Marie Roy, who thereby held the whole block of seven lots that she sold to the town three years later.

In February 1977 the selectmen gave a neighbor on Pinedale Avenue a deed of the town's "right, title and interest" in "Lots 138 and 139 on a Plan of Pinehurst Manor," citing the 1953 Roy deed. The lots the town meant to sell were lots 138 and 139 of the Pinedale Park plan, which it held by a tax title; in May 1979 the selectmen gave a new deed of the Pinedale Park lots, and in August 1979 the buyer quitclaimed the Pinehurst Manor lots back to the town. The town still owns the whole corner, 0.537 acres in the assessor's records.

References

1. Billerica assessor, 832 Boston Rd (parcel 99-189-0): Town of Billerica, fire station, deed 1230-374 of 7/7/1953, Pinehurst Manor lots 134-140

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.