Talbot Textile Mill Worker Housing at 2-4 Lowell St

The Talbot Textile Mill Worker Housing at 2-4 Lowell Street is a two-family company house built in the early 1860s by C. P. Talbot and Co. for workers at the Talbot Mills in North Billerica. It stands on the triangle between Old Elm Street, Lowell Street and Colson Street that the village called "the Common", and the mill historian Kohlrausch counted it among three houses the company built on the Common in the early 1860s, with C. P. Talbot Mill Worker Housing at 8 Lowell St and Talbot Textile Mills Worker Housing at 27-29 Old Elm St.

The Common was part of the land the town granted to Capt. Christopher Osgood for his mill in 1708. Thomas Richardson bought about forty acres of it, "Westerly on the highway", from the Carleton heirs in 1783 and sold it with the mills to the Proprietors of the Middlesex Canal in 1794. The canal laid a private way (now Lowell Street) across its land, cutting off the triangle, and in 1851 it sold the triangle, as parcel G of eleven parcels, with the rest of its Billerica land to Charles P. Talbot and Thomas Talbot for $20,000.

The Talbots built the house soon after their mill opened in 1857, and in 1884 Thomas Talbot and the heirs of Charles P. Talbot conveyed it with the rest of the village to the corporation, The Talbot Mills. A rear ell was added for the new sewer in 1902-03. When the company divided its housing into lots on the Monahan plan of 1936, the house became Lot 57 of Plan B, 5,852 square feet with 84.51 feet on Lowell Street, between the Father Mathew Total Abstinence Society's lot and the lots toward Old Elm Street.

On September 30, 1936 The Talbot Mills sold "the land ... with the buildings thereon" to John G. and Annie M. Gunther of Billerica, keeping the right to the common sewer under the lot. The Gunthers owned the house for thirty years. After both had died, their estate sold it in August 1966 to M & T Construction Corporation, a local developer, which resold it to private owners in 1968. It has been in private hands since, passing through a release by Midland Insurance Company in 1974 and sales in 1977, 2019, 2020 and 2023. The house is a contributing building in the Billerica Mills National Register district (1983) and the local historic district (1992).

References

1. MACRIS BIL.264
2. Billerica assessor, 2-4 Lowell St (parcel 9-107-0): Lot 57, Plan Book 60 Plan 28, two-family

Deed References Expand all

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