Sereno Fisk's Shoe Shop

Sereno Fisk's Shoe Shop stood on the east side of Boston Road at the north corner of Webb Brook Road, where 622 Boston Road is now. The 1853 Walling map labels it "O. Crosby" for Oliver Crosby (born 1806), son of Josiah Crosby Esq. of the Fiske Tavern Stand across the road. The deeds show that the building did not start as a house. It was the shoe shop of Sereno Fisk, a Billerica gentleman and shoe manufacturer who in the 1830s bought up much of the Crosby estate around the tavern.

The earliest record of it is Fisk's mortgage of December 1840 to Dr. Zadok Howe, which pledged "my Carr Place and Sarah Hill land", about six acres between Boston Road, Joseph White's land and "the road crossing Webbs brook", "with a dwelling house and shoe makers shop and store thereon". The dwelling was the old Carr house; the shop was Fisk's. How Fisk acquired the Carr Place has not been found. By January 1844 Fisk had moved to Southport in the Wisconsin Territory, and his attorney Marshall Preston sold fifteen acres "with the buildings thereon standing, consisting of the Carr house, so called, and shoe factory" to Jonathan E. Reed for $1,850. The road along the south side of the lot was then described as "the Road leading from said Boston Road near the Shoe factory".

Reed kept the Carr house, which passed to Abel Hunt, and in 1847 sold the south four acres "with a building thereon formerly the Shoe Factory of Sereno Fisk" to James McKee for $350. The new lot line started at a stake "about one foot southerly of the south end of the Garden spot on said Carr Place" and ran to an elm tree at Joseph White's. When McKee sold to Oliver Crosby in April 1848 for $375, the building had become "a dwelling house ... formerly the Shoe Shop of Sereno Fisk". Crosby, his wife Elizabeth and their children lived there for eight years. In June 1856 they sold "the late homestead of said Oliver & wife & by them occupied ... the house being formerly Fiske's shoe shop", four acres, to Charles Bowen for $1,200.

The place then changed hands often. Bowen sold it in 1860 to George Proctor, a clerk of Oxford, for $2,000. Proctor sold it in 1866 to James W. Fernald, a Boston mason, for $2,500 and took back a $1,000 mortgage. Within the year it passed through Joshua B. Haines of Wolfborough, New Hampshire, to Fernald's wife Sarah, and in 1867 to Maria Lorrie, the wife of John Lorrie, who took on the Proctor mortgage. By then the deeds bounded the four acres by "the road leading from said Billerica to Woburn" (Boston Road), Joseph Noyes's land on the north, Joseph White's wall on the east and "the old road leading to Burlington" (Webb Brook Road) on the south. The Lorries sold in 1870 to Mary A. Reed, wife of Benjamin W. Reed Jr., for $2,000. The Reeds mortgaged it in 1874 to Mary E. Skelton of Lowell, and after the Skeltons died the mortgage was foreclosed. On May 11, 1889 the auctioneer George A. Murphy sold "a lot of land with the buildings thereon" on the premises to Jackson Wright for $1,675.

Wright passed it the same day to Rebecca A. Campbell, wife of William C. Campbell. She mortgaged it to the Boston merchant Eben D. Jordan, with a promise to keep the buildings insured for $1,200. In 1906, as a widow, she deeded the place to Jordan's trustees instead of a foreclosure, and that August they sold it, still "with the buildings thereon", to A. Gertrude and Mary E. Tutein, the wives of Constantine D. and Albert E. Tutein. By September 1907 the house was gone. That month the Tuteins sold Clara Cox a lot 100 feet square on the road, laid out to make "the cellar where the house formerly stood about equally distant" from its two front bounds. Cox sold the cellar lot in 1909 to Arthur W. Merriam and Charles E. Moore, who had bought the rest of the four acres from the Tuteins in 1908. In October 1912 Merriam and Moore sold the two front acres at the corner of Webb Brook Road to Ida L. Wheeler, and the back acre to William B. Wheeler.

The state highway relocation of 1931 and the widening of Webb Brook Road in 1950 cut the corner lot down to about half an acre. The present house at 622 Boston Road was built about 1940, according to the assessor. In 1969 the Veterans Administration sold "a certain parcel of land with the buildings thereon ... known as and numbered 622 Boston Road" to private owners, and it has stayed in private hands since then, with a mortgage foreclosure sale in 1977 and later sales in 1979, 1982, 2016 and 2021. The Webb Brook Road corner across from it, the triangle of the Crosby Slaughterhouse, was once the Crosby family's slaughter house lot.

References

1. Billerica assessor, 622 Boston Rd (parcel 80-89-0): 0.5 acre, house built about 1940, sales history 1982-2021

Deed References Expand all

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