Samuel Richardson House (Cook Street)

72 Cook Street is an old two-story wood-frame farmhouse with one-story ells on the north side of Cook Street in Pinehurst. Cook Street was long known simply as "the road leading from Billerica to Wilmington", and the house stands on what the deeds of the nineteenth century call two parcels "with the buildings thereon", fifteen acres in all, one of them beside "the Pear Tree Pasture, so called". The house has no MACRIS inventory form; its traditional date of 1750 comes from the assessors. The land records trace the place back to the Richardson farm of the eighteenth century but cannot by themselves prove which of that farm's houses is the one standing today.

The farm lay south of the Shawsheen River, bounded on one side by Harvard's College Farm, with the Wilmington road running through it. The Richardsons were here early: in February 1733 John Richardson sold Samuel Richardson 87 1/2 acres "on the southeast side of Shawshin River a little beneath the College Farm". In 1764 Joseph Ross sold Samuel Richardson Jr. an 88-acre "Messuage or tenement" there "with all the Buildings thereon", reserving "the highway two Rods wide thro the same leading from Billerica to Wilmington". Thirty years later, on February 5, 1794, Samuel Richardson Jr. and his wife Martha deeded to their sons Samuel (the third) and John a farm of 151 acres "with two dwelling houses and two barns standing thereon", bounded by William Gleason, Samuel Hopkins, Sears Cook, James Bennett and "the Colledge line", the road to Wilmington crossing it. The brothers divided it, and on February 12, 1802 the younger Samuel sold his part, "a certain farm which formerly was my Father's but now mine", to his neighbor James Bennett for 507 pounds.

James Bennett built up a large estate on both sides of the Billerica-Burlington line and died without a will about 1842. In the division of his lands the commissioners gave his daughter Mary McPherson "The Richardson Farm and buildings, containing by estimation Eighty acres", with all of his land adjoining it on the north side of the road and "the Peartree Lot" of ten acres. In 1845 she sold the whole, 93 acres "with the buildings thereon", to George Bennett of Burlington, and in 1850 George Bennett sold about thirty acres of it on the Wilmington road, with the buildings and the Pear Tree pasture, to Abel W. Harrington of Lincoln for $900.

Harrington cut the place down to the fifteen-acre homestead that the later deeds describe, 990 feet along the road from William A. Gleason's land to "a cross road leading to the Boston and Lowell Turnpike", and sold it in 1869 to Julia E. Bryant of Boston for $1,100. The next five years were unsettled. Bryant's mortgage was foreclosed by auction on the premises on New Year's Day 1872, when Horace W. Berry bid $500; Berry passed it to Alphonzo T. Merrill, whose own mortgagee, James Tower of Lowell, sold it at auction in Lowell in November 1873 and took it back through the buyer, John A. Knowles. In 1874 Tower sold it to Albert R. Richardson of Billerica for $700, and for some years it was "known as the Albert R. Richardson farm". In 1880 and 1881 it changed hands four times in quick succession (Maria A. Byam, Nancy M. Brown, Lund S. Eastman of Lynn, and the mortgagee Andrew C. Wheelock) before Darius E. Quimby bought it for $800. Quimby sold it in 1894 to Eugene G. Russell of Lowell, who sold it in April 1895 to Peder E. Holman.

The Holmans kept the farm for 28 years. After Peder E. Holman's death his five children released their shares to their mother, Lena E. Holman, in 1923, and on August 21, 1923 she sold the fifteen acres "with the buildings thereon" to Dominick J. and Elizabeth M. Flaherty of Charlestown, taking back a $2,500 mortgage and requiring the buildings to be insured for $3,000. The Flahertys made it their home: Elizabeth died in 1946 and was buried at Fox Hill Cemetery, and the land passed through Dominick J. Flaherty's estate to his children John J. and Helen E. Flaherty. Over the following decades house lots were sold off the old farm. In 1982 the remaining land was divided into three lots, Lot 1-A on Cook Street "showing a two-story dwelling and a one-story concrete block garage" and two lots behind it on Lamont Street. After John J. Flaherty's death his administrator sold the house lot in 1986, and it has since been owned privately.

On the question of age, the records show buildings on this farm by 1764 and two dwelling houses on it by 1794, and they show the house lot carrying "the buildings thereon" in every deed from 1850 onward. They are consistent with an eighteenth-century Richardson farmhouse surviving at 72 Cook Street, but they do not confirm the date of 1750; that would need a look at the house frame or an early tax list.

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.