Reuel Goodwin House

The Reuel Goodwin House was a farmhouse on the north side of Cook Street in Pinehurst, on the site of today's 26 Cook Street, at the head of a farm of about fifty-eight acres that ran back from the road to the Shawsheen River. Cook Street was then "the road leading from said Billerica to Wilmington." The Walling map of 1853 labels the house "B. F. Beard," for Benjamin F. Beard, who married Reuel Goodwin's daughter Betsey C. Goodwin in 1833 and farmed here from the 1840s into the 1860s. The house was taken down about 1984, and an industrial building, now a self-storage facility, was built on the lot about 1985.

The house is first recorded at the death of Reuel Goodwin, a Billerica yeoman, who died without a will in 1846. His heirs had Marshall Preston appointed administrator in October 1846, and the appraisers, Abner Shed, Francis Carter and William S. Gleason, valued "the farm with the Buildings thereon" at $2,400. No deed to Reuel Goodwin for the farm has been found, so when and how he acquired it, and when the house was built, is not known. Hazen's genealogy lists a Reuel Goodwin, son of Thomas and Mary (Ditson) Goodwin, born in 1754, with the same children (Rhoda Reed, Barbara Richardson, Betsey Beard, Caroline and Reuel), though it gives him a death date of 1807 that the probate papers do not bear out. The 1801 deed from Josiah Richardson to Thomas Goodwin that has sometimes been connected with this farm belongs to a different Goodwin homestead on the road to the Shawsheen River, which Thomas Goodwin sold to Haslet Mackay in 1833.

In 1848 commissioners appointed by the Probate Court divided the estate among the heirs. The first item in their report was "About four acres of Mowing & tillage land, with the House standing on the same," valued at $610, followed by the barn lot of about nineteen acres "with the Barn standing thereon" across the road, the Logging pasture, the Swamp lot, the Lathrop lot, the River pasture, a corner called Tillingham corner and a horse shed at the Burlington meeting house. The house itself was split. Caroline Goodwin received "the westerly part of the dwelling house late of said Deceased," along a line drawn "through the house" on the west wall of the front entry, with eight feet of the cellar and the right to use the stairs, entries and well "so long as said house shall stand," together with twenty-one acres of the river pasture. "The Easterly part of the house" and the rest of the farm went in common to the other heirs.

Benjamin F. Beard then bought out those other heirs. Reuel Goodwin Jr., by then of Manchester, New Hampshire, had already sold his interest to his brother-in-law Daniel Richardson, a Woburn blacksmith, in October 1846. In 1847 Charles O. Reed of Nashua released his grandfather's estate to Beard, and on March 10, 1848 Richardson conveyed both his own share and, as guardian, the shares of his daughters Barbara Ann and Melvina to Beard. The same day Benjamin and Betsey Beard mortgaged "about fifty eight acres with the buildings thereon" and the thirty-acre barn lot back to Richardson for $1,038, "saving to the aforesaid Caroline" her part of the house. In 1858 a neighboring deed described Cook Street as the road "from the house of Benj. F. Beard to Wilmington."

The mortgage was never paid off. On January 13, 1865 George Flagg and Caroline Goodwin watched Daniel Richardson "enter upon & take open and peaceable possession" of the farm to foreclose. In April 1868 Richardson assigned the mortgage to George Bacon of Billerica for $600, and in July 1868 Caroline Goodwin sold Bacon her lot "with part of a dwelling house thereon standing" for $139, so that Bacon held the whole house. In April 1870 Bacon sold the farm for $600 to Sylvester E. Beard, taking back a mortgage of $500. Sylvester E. Beard farmed here until his death in 1913, and town reports of the 1880s pay "S. E. Beard" for carrying children to the Crosby School. His widow Maria deeded the farm in 1918 to their son Sylvester P. (Percy) Beard, who mortgaged it in 1922. When Cook Street was relocated in 1931, Percy Beard's land was among the easements taken.

John A. Akeson of Woburn, who had acquired Percy Beard's mortgage, foreclosed it at auction on the premises on May 13, 1939 and bought the farm himself for $1,975. After Akeson's death his trustees sold the land in 1971 to Warren E. McCarthy, whose family trusts held it as "Parcel One" of a 1967 survey (57.68 acres) until it passed to William E. McCarthy in 1981. Most of the river land is now Akeson Field and the Shawsheen Woods houses, and the barn lot across the road became the site of the Ditson School.

In January 1985 William McCarthy had the frontage on Cook Street divided into Lots A, B and C, and on May 30, 1985 he sold Lot B, 6.46 acres at the old house site, to the trustees of HF Realty Trust of Lowell for $625,256. No building is shown on Lot B on the plan, and the deed mentions none; the Goodwin and Beard house was gone. The trust built an industrial building on the lot, financed under a 1985 mortgage and indenture of trust to which the Town of Billerica was a party, and in 1988 sold it "with the buildings thereon" to Cook Street Limited Partnership. The property later belonged to Nutcracker Snacks, Inc. (1996), HFT, LLC (1997) and Nutcracker Brands, Inc. (1998), then to Exeter 26 Cook, LLC (2012) and Big Box Property Owner F-1, LLC (2015). After a self-storage zoning overlay was approved in 2017, the building was sold in 2018 to PSI Atlantic Billerica MA, LLC and converted to self storage.

References

1. Billerica assessor, 26 Cook St (parcel 91-343-1): 6.461 acres, Lot B of Plan Book 148 Plan 29, building of about 1985, sales from 1988
2. Hazen (1883), Genealogical Register: Beard 19 (Benjamin F. m. 1833 Betsey C. Goodwin, dau. of Reuel) and Goodwin 2 (Reuel and his children)

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.