Stearns Brook

Stearns Brook rises at Billerica Center, behind the First Congregational Church of Billerica, on land that belonged in 1949 to Arthur S. Cook, and runs north beside Boston Road to the Concord River. It passes behind the old Howe School at 390 Boston Road and near Mulberry Lane and Skyline Drive, crosses Farmers Lane, runs past Bennett Hall Station and the houses on Boston Road below it, passes under Boston Road in a culvert at Brown's Corner, and reaches the river meadows near Pershing Street. Much of it is piped or culverted, and the state's maps show it only in short open pieces. It is the northern of the two "town brooks" of the Center; Town Brook runs south from the same high ground.

The Historical Commission's site form for the "headwater area of 'Stearns Brook,' which flows N from center," noted "rear of Congo Church," records a possible prehistoric site of the Archaic period there. The brook had its name by 1908, when the warrant asked the town to declare "the Blanchard and Stearns brooks a main drain or common sewer." The records do not say for whom it was named; Stearns families had lived at the Center since the first settlement. At the 1909 annual meeting the town raised $300 and declared both brooks main sewers, and it voted small sums for "the Stearns and Blanchard Brooks" almost every year afterward. In 1910 the highway surveyor Harry W. Essex repaired a culvert at "Stearn's Brook," and in 1911 he reported "digging out Stearns Brook and putting in one large culvert." In 1919 the town gave the work to a committee of three, which was to "draw plans for the permanent improvement of these brooks"; that year a culvert was built by contract and the brook "was widened and deepened from Farmer's Lane to Main street at Brown's Corner." In 1925 it was "cleaned, brushed and the grass cut as far as the Concord River."

The brook ran behind the Old Howe School, and the school committee asked in 1926 that the cramped school lot be "drained through the Stearns brook" and graded, and in 1928 that "the Stearns Brook" be "carried by a drain pipe." In 1928 the town voted $200 to pipe and grade the brook for about seventy-five feet "through the property of Uno Ohlson," and the surveyor laid 76 feet of two-foot pipe there; the same year he replanked the "bridge on Henry Hutchins' land over Stearns Brook," noting that "the Town maintains this bridge." The warrant of 1929 asked $800 for the brook, $500 of it "to straighten and rebuild culvert which crosses Boston Road at Brown's Corner." From 1931 to 1933 the town was asked for $2,000 to drain the land "between Bennett Hall Station and Stearns Brook, and clean brook from Main Street to the river"; it dismissed the article in 1932 and voted $200 in 1933. In 1932 the brook was cleaned "from Henry Hutchins' line to Boston Rd." The 1939 warrant proposed to "clean, widen and relay old stone on the side wall in the Stearns Brook from Boston Road to the Concord River," and in 1943 the brook was "cleaned, sides cleaned of debris and somewhat straightened" under a vote of 1942.

In 1948 Town Meeting voted $700 to clear Stearns Brook and asked Albert Warren Stearns to bring in "a proper name or designation for the two town brooks, one going north, and one going south." In March 1949, on the report of his Committee on Brooks, it voted that "the brook arising in the land of Mr. Arthur S. Cook, pursuing a northerly course and ultimately reaching the Concord River, be officially named the Stearns Brook, from its source to the river, and that all other names be abandoned for official purposes." The town went on voting money "to clean the Blanchard and Stearns Brooks" in the 1950s. In 1972 the water department worked with the highway department on "the drainage problem on a piped section of Stearns Brook," and in 1973 Town Meeting rescinded the vote of 1908 and declared the brook no longer a main sewer. A plan of 2004 for the land at 336 Boston Road (Plan Book 214, Plan 33) shows the brook beside Heritage Road. It is now a small urban stream, running in pipe and in narrow channels behind the houses and businesses of Boston Road to the river meadows below Brown's Corner.

Stearns Brook

Stearns Brook

References