Poor Farm Brook

Poor Farm Brook is a small brook in the northern corner of North Billerica, near the Tewksbury and Lowell lines, east of the Concord River. It crosses Town Farm Lane west of High Street and runs northwest through the low ground beside the railroad toward the river meadows; a second branch comes from the south past Billerica Avenue, and a small pond lies beside it near the west end of the lane.

The brook is named for the town's poor farm, which lay along it. The farm had been the Rogers farm: Josiah Rogers built a family tomb there in 1803, and his son Jacob Osgood Rogers sold the town 175 acres "with the buildings thereon" for $3,100, probably in the 1820s, since land around the tomb was set off for burial in 1826. Walling's map of 1853 marks the "Town Farm" with a lane running west from the present High Street past its buildings and across the railroad, and from 1865 the town reports carry the accounts of the farm and almshouse and its superintendent. In 1896 the town sold about forty-two acres of the farm west of the railroad to the Lowell Rendering Company, and the farm itself was gone by 1945.

The only record of the brook's name is in the report of the Fish and Game Warden, Arthur Raymond Hallenborg, for 1934: "During the summer drought many of the brooks again dried up necessitating the netting of trout from these streams and transferring them to the deep river waters. Among the brooks so netted were Webb Brook, Jones Brook, So. Billerica and Poor Farm Brook." The brook was then a stocked trout stream, and the warden and the Billerica Rod and Gun Club were releasing hundreds of trout a year in the town's brooks.

The lane to the farm crossed the brook. In 1916 "Town Farm Lane was repaired and a 24 ft. culvert crossing the same was rebuilt," in 1953 the lane was "patched and culvert repaired," and in 1957 the public works department "installed 36" drainage pipe on Town Farm Lane." Today the brook runs through woods and wet ground between the industrial land along the railroad and the houses of Town Farm Lane and Billerica Avenue.

Poor Farm Brook

Poor Farm Brook

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