Rangeway Road

Location	Map
Neighborhood	Finn Subdivision Forest Park Rangeway Estates
Laid Out	1708
Right of Way	30 - 50 ft
Pavement	20 ft

Rangeway Road runs southwest from Boston Road in North Billerica, past the Chelmsford Road junction and across Route 3, through the woods east of Gilson Hill to the Carlisle line. Its name records the great division of the common lands west of the Concord River in 1708. In that division, Hazen wrote, "a rangeway ran parallel with the Chelmsford line, about half-a-mile distant, following also its westerly deflection," and the ranges of lots were laid out on either side of it, the first range "between Chelmsford line and the rangeway" and the second southeast of it. In 1883 he added that the "rangeway" road, "as its name indicates, followed the dividing line between the first and second ranges of lots in the great land division of 1708," and that "the road still follows the line thus indicated." No separate laying out of the road is recorded.

The word rangeway was used for more than one line in the town. The 1708 division east of the river had its own rangeway between the first and second parts of the Second Division, and deeds of 1794 and 1796 bound land on Fox Hill "on the Rangeway"; a woodlot in Carlisle divided by the heirs of Jonathan Hill in 1796 also ran to "a range way." Those records belong to other lines. The West Billerica road is placed by a sheriff's levy of 1812 on the farm of William Manning, whose land on the southwest side of the road from Billerica to Chelmsford was bounded in part by "the range way road."

The street naming committee chosen in 1896 called it "Carlisle street, running westerly from Main street to Carlisle line, No. Billerica," after the town it led to. At a meeting of citizens at the rooms of the Historical Society in March 1898 the name was "Changed to Rangeway Road to Carlisle," and the list accepted at town meeting on March 27, 1899 gave "27. Rangeway road, from Boston road running westerly to Carlisle line, No. Billerica." The corner at Boston Road was known in the 1920s as Ingham's Corner, from the Ingham family whose land lay on its north side.

The road was graveled in pieces from 1902, when a guard rail was built on it. In 1926 the County Commissioners laid out the eastern end anew, from the state highway at Boston Road southwesterly past the Chelmsford Road junction, on five sheets "as ordered by the County Commissioners 1926" (returns of March 9, 1926). A warrant of 1926 asked for $3,000 to "gravel and tar the surface of Rangeway Rd.; from Inghams Corner at the Boston Rd.; to the Carlisle line," and the town voted $2,000 in 1927 to gravel and oil it. That year 3,885 feet were graveled and the road was treated with Tarvia "Boston Rd. to 400 ft. south of Watson's residence." The rest remained a gravel road until a Works Progress Administration "Farm to Market" project began "2½ miles of sub-grading on Rangeway Road to Carlisle Line" in 1936. Interrupted in 1938, when the men were moved to the fire project, it was finished in 1939 with 8,448 feet of road construction, ledge cutting, stone headwalls and drainage, and in 1941 the highway department "tarred 10,975 linear feet 24 feet wide."

When the state built the limited access Route 3 in 1953 it carried Rangeway Road over the new highway on an overpass, for which the town paid its share in 1953 and 1954. The Department of Public Works plan "for the relocation of Rangeway Road, dated 1953," moved the road and the end of Winning Road at the crossing; the bypassed piece of "the original Rangeway Road" is the short street now called Old Rangeway Road, a name in use by 1968. The state altered the interchange layout at Rangeway Road in 1959 and again in 2002, and the land along the road near Route 3 was rezoned for business and industry from the 1950s on.

Rangeway Road was among the streets named in 1899 and was carried without a date in the town's list of accepted streets printed in 1956, "From Boston Rd. west to Carlisle line." It was formally accepted as a public way at the Fall Town Meeting of October 2016, which voted, 124 to 19, under Chapter 82, sections 21 to 24, of the General Laws, to accept the 57 old roads "the layout of which is shown on the official Town of Billerica Map of 1831." The list gives it from the Carlisle town line to Boston Road. A different Rangeway Road, a street in the Pines section of the town, was the subject of a warrant article of 1942.

Historic Buildings

Name	Address	Built	Demolished
Isaac Brown House	121 Rangeway Rd	1800	2000
Otis Lincoln House	120 Rangeway Rd	1842
A. Bohonan House	226 Rangeway Rd	1852	2010
A. Hill Jr. House	247 Rangeway Rd	1852	1964
A. N. Brown House	152 Rangeway Rd	1852	1969
J. Douge House	85 Rangeway Rd	1852	1987

Rangeway Road

Rangeway Road

Historic Buildings

References