Ricca Farm

Location	Map
Established	1992
Area	About 27 acres
Roads	Ash Tree Lane Ricca Farm Road

Ricca Farm is a cluster subdivision of fourteen house lots on the former Ricca poultry farm, on the north side of Nashua Road near the Carlisle line, whose farmhouse at 119 Nashua Road is the Horace N. Wilson house of about 1850. After the town meeting of 1988 rezoned the land for a cluster overlay, the "Ricca Farm, Billerica, Massachusetts, Definitive Cluster Subdivision Plan," dated July 21, 1989 and revised April 16, 1990, was prepared by Hartwright, landscape architects of Carlisle, with the Malcolm N. Johnston Company, land surveyors and civil engineers of Arlington, for the owners John A. and Joan E. Ricca. The Planning Board granted the cluster special permit on January 10, 1990 and approved the plan on June 30, 1992, and it was recorded on July 8, 1992 (Plan Book 179, Plan 8). The lots, of about 20,000 to 48,000 square feet, are grouped with open areas between them and a conservation lot of about six acres around the wetlands and a pond. Lots were sold from 1991 and 1993 and the houses date from about 1993. Its streets are Ricca Farm Road and Ash Tree Lane, accepted in 1995.

The common land of the subdivision, the "Open Area" of about 15.5 acres of woods, wetland and a small pond around the backs of the house lots and the 6.1-acre "Lot 14A Conservation Area" beside it, belongs to the Ricca Farm Homeowners Association; it is private common land of the neighborhood, not town conservation land.

The land was the farm of John A. and Joan E. Ricca, poultry farmers, who in March 1957 bought the old farmhouse at 119 Nashua Road, the Horace N. Wilson House, with 14.8 acres on the southwest side of the road, from Roger A. Toothaker Jr. and Arthur C. Fillmore. Evald B. and Ruth S. Larson, who had kept a chicken farm here since 1933, sold their eighty acres in 1955, and by 1957 Toothaker and Fillmore owned them. The eighty acres were the part west of the county road of the farm that Horace N. Wilson sold his father Daniel in 1859, and earlier of Captain Thomas Spaulding's 189 acres between the Rangeway and the Carlisle line. In 1970 Fillmore sold the land behind the Ricca farm to Content Homes, Inc., whose June 1973 plan marked out an "Area = 21.6+ Acres" between the Ricca land, the Carlisle line and a brook (Plan Book 117, Plan 64). Content Homes deeded it in 1974 to its president, William F. Kindred, and his partners, and in March 1977 they sold the 21.6 acres to the Riccas for $8,000.

Before the plan was recorded the land changed hands. In May 1991 the Riccas conveyed the 21.6 acres for $110,000 and the farm land on Nashua Road, less the house lot, for $100,000 to Eight Mile Holdings, Inc. of Boston, "an absolute conveyance" made also in return for the buyer's "covenant not to sue on two certain guaranties" the Riccas had signed in 1985. Eight Mile Holdings sold the land to the Billerica builder George Allen & Son Construction, Inc., and on July 8, 1992, the day the plan was recorded (Plan Book 179, Plan 8), the builder deeded to the new Ricca Farm Homeowners Association, Inc., for one dollar, "All land designated as" the "Open Area" on the plan and "Lot 14A Conservation Area". Most of the houses were built in 1992 and 1993, and the town accepted Ricca Farm Road and Ash Tree Lane as public ways on May 18, 1995. The old farmhouse still stands on its own lot of about 1.8 acres on Nashua Road.

Ricca Farm

Ricca Farm

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