Samuel Stearns House

The Samuel Stearns House stands on the west side of Concord Road at the Bedford line, where the road becomes North Road; the house lot lies partly in each town. Family tradition, recorded by the Historical Commission in 1973, holds that Samuel Stearns (1726-1801) built it in 1749, when he married Elizabeth Hutchinson, whose family lived across the road. She died the following March, and he married second Hannah Trask. His father, also Samuel, had died before 1730 leaving several small children, so the house may have been begun earlier.

The deeds show that by 1795 it was a double house on a seventy acre homestead. In July of that year Samuel Stearns and his wife Hannah gave their son Issachar "the one half both in quantity & quality" of the farm, on the county road from Billerica to Bedford by Benjamin Hutchinson, "with one half of all the Buildings thereon he to have the Easterly end of my Dwelling house to the middle of the Chimney right up & down with the seller under it," reserving the bedroom for the old couple's lives. In December 1798 Issachar sold that half, with the east end of the house, to Joseph Danforth for $500. When Samuel died in July 1801 his will left Hannah "the improvement of all my Real Estate," with a room for their unmarried daughters Hannah and Molly, and Issachar, who "has had much more than all the rest," one dollar. The appraisers first divided the estate from Danforth's and listed "One half of the Dwelling House, being the westerly end to the middle of the Chimney," with the oven and stairs held in common "by the owners of each end of said House."

In 1803 Danforth sold his three acres "with the house thereon," and two more acres, to Sampson Spaulding, reserving to Samuel's daughters the use of the oven, the cellar and garret stairs, the well and the dooryard. In 1811 Samuel's daughter Hannah Spaulding, a widow, released to Sampson "all my right ... in and unto the house which Samuel Stearns my late father died seized," and in 1815 he bought the adjoining farm of the Benjamin Hutchinson heirs, east of the road. Spaulding mortgaged the whole in 1827 to John Skinner of Charlestown, and when he died in 1835 he left the residue to his widow Susannah. After her death his children, Benjamin A. Spaulding, a clergyman in Ottumwa, Iowa, Andrew J. Spaulding of West Lebanon, New Hampshire, and Martha R. Spaulding, released the farm in August 1849 to Skinner, who still held the mortgage.

On March 30, 1852 Skinner sold "the farm known as the Sampson Spaulding farm," seventy acres partly in Billerica and partly in Bedford, with sixteen acres on the west side of the road "with the Buildings thereon standing," to Royal T. Bryant of Bedford for $3,000; the 1853 map shows R. T. Bryant here. Bryant sold it in 1865 to Josiah B. Gleason, who sold it back the next year to Sarah H. Bryant. By 1872 it belonged to John A. Merriam, who called it "my homestead farm" when he sold it that February to William G. Taylor of West Roxbury for $6,000; Taylor deeded it back at the end of 1873, and the 1875 atlas shows J. A. Merriam here. Merriam's wife Nancy Bacon was a great-great-granddaughter of Samuel Stearns's sister Elizabeth, and their granddaughter later married a descendant of Samuel Stearns.

In 1876 Merriam sold the farm to Abel S. Farwell of Fitchburg, who sold it in 1877 to Thomas Wilson of Lowell and William Wilson of Boston. In 1887 it passed through Harriet A. Edwards of Boston to Mary A. Pardee, wife of J. N. Pardee of Laconia, New Hampshire, and in 1899 the Pardees sold it, now sixty-two acres, to Guy P. Walton of Everett, reserving a strip for the Lexington and Boston Street Railway, whose cars then ran along the road. Because the farm lay on the town line, the later deeds were recorded at Cambridge, and the land was eventually divided. A lean-to on the back of the house was removed about 1875. When the Historical Commission recorded the house in 1973 it stood on a lot of about 1.2 acres; the house lot is now 1.28 acres, and it remains a private residence.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.183
2. Middlesex probate 21330: will of Samuel Stearns of Billerica, 1801
3. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883): the Stearns family in the Genealogical Register

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.