Sarah Lilla Fletcher Murphy House

The Sarah Lilla Fletcher Murphy House at 372 Boston Road is a two-and-a-half-story Queen Anne house with an attached carriage barn and cupola, built about 1902 in what is now the Billerica Center Historic District. Its land was part of the nine-and-a-half-acre homestead around the John Baldwin House (Boston Road) that William and Lydia A. Blanchard sold to Albert Stearns in 1869. Stearns kept the land as open ground for three decades; a mortgage he gave George H. Hall in 1886 covered the whole tract.

On May 2, 1901 Stearns sold Orra A. Fletcher of Billerica, for $500, a bare lot 150 feet square on the "Great Road" now called Main Street, beginning "at the southwest corner of the 'Preston' land, so called". On March 14, 1902 he sold Fletcher the land wrapping around it on the north and east, 186 feet deep and running back "to a stone bound in the centre of the brook", and Hall released that parcel from his mortgage the same day for $150. Neither deed mentions a building. Together the two lots made the present lot, 156 feet on the road, drawn as "W. Bryant 32,560 sq ft = 0.745 acres" on a 1931 survey of the Stearns land.

Orra A. Fletcher (1828-1907), a Civil War veteran and longtime overseer in the Lowell cotton mills, had bought a farm across the road in the late 1880s. His daughter Sarah Lilla Fletcher (1856-1938) had married Jacob Murphy, a conductor on the Stony Brook Railroad, who died in 1899, and Orra's wife Adeline died a few weeks later. The house went up on the new lot for Sarah. On February 27, 1903 her father, now a widower, deeded her "two certain lots of land with the buildings thereon situated on the east side of Main Street", though the deed was not recorded until March 25, 1907, just after his death. The builder is not known; the carpenters David Fitch and Gerrit H. Bennink, both neighbors, are possibilities.

Mrs. Murphy lived here for 25 years, sharing the house for a time with the family of the druggist Roland G. Wright. On June 2, 1928 she sold it to Graham R. Whidden, a Lowell insurance broker, who resold it on October 2 to the dentist Dr. Warren E. Bryant and his wife Elsie, financed by a $4,000 mortgage from the Lowell Co-operative Bank. On May 13, 1932 the Bryants deeded the house back to Mrs. Murphy, by then living in Manchester, New Hampshire, who took a $3,700 mortgage from the same bank. The next summer she sold it to George N. Ward and his son J. Chester Ward, monument dealers of Manchester, subject to that mortgage; on October 16, 1933 they sold it to Lalia A. L. Brown of Billerica, and the bank discharged the mortgage the same afternoon.

Lalia Brown (1892-1976), born on Prince Edward Island, and her husband G. Harold Brown ran Brown's Pork Store, a delicatessen in Lowell, and raised six children here; their son Leonard later bought the Baldwin house next door. In 1961 she deeded the house to her daughter Thelma, a domestic arts supervisor at the Howe High School, and in 1962 Thelma made it joint with her mother again. The deeds of those years note that the Great Road and Main Street "is now known as Boston Road". The Browns sold the house on May 25, 1967.

Since then the house has had private owners. It was sold in 1978 and 1987, taken by the Federal National Mortgage Association by foreclosure in 1997, and resold that September for $140,000 to the couple who had bought it from the Browns in 1967; it has stayed in their family since. The rear of the barn connection was enlarged into an in-law apartment, and the front of the wraparound porch was replaced by a bay window, but much of the gable and eave trim survives. The assessor's date of "about 1890" is too early: the deeds show the lot was bare land until 1902.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.387
2. Billerica assessor, parcel 41-32-0 (372 Boston Rd, 0.744 acres, two-family): sales 1987-2025.

Deed References Expand all

Recorded is Book/Page at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds unless noted.