Talbot Textile Mill Worker Housing at 44-46 Wilson St

The two-family house at 44-46 Wilson Street in North Billerica is one of the duplexes built for workers of the Talbot Mills. It stands on Lot 10 of the Talbot Mills "Plan A" of 1936, a lot of 9,150 square feet on the southeast side of Wilson Street, between the Joseph Salter House (Wilson St) (Lot 9) to the north and Lot 11 to the south, with the B and L Laundry lot behind it toward the Concord River.

The land was part of the "Mill yard lot" of Nathaniel Stearns, cut from the old homestead of Nathan Mears. Stearns's will of 1845 directed his executor, Marshall Preston, to sell all his real estate at public auction. On March 25, 1846 Preston sold the northern part to the carpenter Joseph J. Salter and, the same day, the southern acre to Daniel Wilson, a parcel "containing by estimation one acre" running from the centre of the "Passage way" (the later Wilson Street) about 14 rods east to the Concord River, "it being the southerly lot of the said deceased's 'Mill yard lot' so called".

Wilson kept the acre with his adjoining homestead until his death in 1861. His administrator, his son-in-law Gardner Parker, sold the 28-acre homestead at auction in 1863, and it came back to Parker in 1864. In 1869 Parker sold the river end, ten acres bounded "by a wall and an open passage way", to Charles P. Talbot and Thomas Talbot, whose firm C. P. Talbot and Co. already owned the Salter lot and the mills across the river. The duplex appears on the 1875 map; MACRIS dates it about 1865 and names C. P. Talbot and Co. as the original owner, but the Talbots did not own this part of the Wilson land until 1869, so it was more likely built between 1869 and 1875. In 1884 the Talbot heirs conveyed their North Billerica property to the new corporation, The Talbot Mills.

The company rented the house to its workers for more than fifty years, and in the early 1900s the rear ell was enlarged when the houses were connected to a common sewer. When the mill village was surveyed into lots and sold off, The Talbot Mills sold Lot 10 "with the buildings thereon" to William J. Norris and Eliza J. Norris on October 17, 1939, keeping a right of way behind the Wilson Street lots open and reserving the common sewer. After William J. Norris died, the Union National Bank, executor of his will, sold the house in 1968 for $7,000.

The house has since passed through several private owners (1978, 1999, 2001 and 2011). It was damaged by fire in November 1992, and the assessor dates the present building to about 1993. In 2024 Billerica Town Meeting accepted Wilson Street as a public way, and the Select Board took the street easement that summer.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.120

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.