Talbot Textile Mill Worker Housing at 52-54 Wilson St

The double house at 52-54 Wilson Street is one of the two-family tenements that C. P. Talbot and Company built for the workers of its woolen mills in North Billerica. It stands on Lot 12 of the Talbot Mills "Plan A" (Plan Book 60 Plan 25), on the southeasterly side of Wilson Street between the street and the Concord River, with almost 100 feet on the street and a lot of nearly half an acre running back toward the river. Its neighbors in the row are the houses on Lot 11 to the northeast and 56-58 Wilson Street (Lot 13) to the southwest.

The land was part of the farm that the Proprietors of the Middlesex Canal sold to Nathan Mears in 1819, 27 acres of the old Richardson farm on the west bank of the river near the Canal Mills. Mears died in 1828, and in 1832 the guardians of his children had the homestead surveyed into numbered lots with a lane running through it, and sold them at auction on March 20, 1832. Joel Dix bought lot 9, "two acres & one hundred and fifty eight rods" bounded "Southeasterly by Concord River". He sold an undivided half of it to his neighbor Daniel Wilson for $71 on April 3, 1832, and the other half for $150 in 1848, when it ran from "the lane that runs through said homestead" to the river, next to the "lumber yard" lot. The lane is now Wilson Street. The southerly acre of the lumber yard, which Wilson bought in 1846, takes in Plan A Lot 10 and most of Lot 11, so Lot 12 lies in the old lot 9.

Daniel Wilson died on November 29, 1861. His administrator, Gardner Parker, sold the homestead farm to James Faulkner in 1863 and bought it back in 1864, and in 1869 Parker sold the river end of the farm, "ten acres and thirty nine rods", to Charles P. Talbot and Thomas Talbot. The deed names no buildings on it, so this house was built after 1869. The 1974 survey of the mill village dated it "ca. 1868" only by its style, between the Talbots' earliest tenements and the later ones with gabled entrances, and pointed to the 1875 map; it was standing by then, built about 1873, and it is drawn among the double houses on the June 1881 "Plan of the Property of C. P. Talbot and Company, West Side of Concord River" (Plan Book 4 Plan 59). In 1884 the Talbot family conveyed the mills and village to the corporation The Talbot Mills, which rented the houses to its workers for half a century.

The Talbot Mills began selling its houses when Plan A was recorded in the fall of 1936, and this was among the first. On September 30, 1936 it sold Lot 12, "the land in said Billerica with the buildings thereon situated on the easterly side of Wilson Street", 20,728 square feet, to Margaret Fairbrother and Joseph S. Fairbrother of Billerica as joint tenants, with $2.50 in revenue stamps and with the right of way behind the houses "forever kept open" and the common sewer reserved to the mill. Several Fairbrothers bought Wilson Street houses from the mill. Joseph S. Fairbrother, born in Billerica in 1895, had served in France in the First World War with Battery A of the 6th Anti-Aircraft Battalion. Margaret died first, probably the Margaret Fairbrother who died in Billerica in February 1940 at 88, and Joseph kept the house, without a mortgage, until his death. In June 1963 the administrator of his estate, Melvin L. Shalloo, sold it to two buyers who a few weeks later conveyed it to their company, Trader Homes, Inc. Trader Homes sold it in 1964 to Timco, Inc. of Medford, and Timco sold it in 1965 to private owners.

Since then the house has had private owners. One who bought it in 1970 by taking over the mortgage was living there when the house was surveyed in 1974 and when the North Billerica mill village was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. The Town took the lot for unpaid taxes in 1992, but the taxes were paid and the lot was sold in 1994. Later sales were in 2003, 2004, 2010 and 2025, the last for $805,000. In 2024 the Town accepted Wilson Street, long a private way through the mill village, as a public way.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.122
2. Billerica assessor record for 52-54 Wilson St (parcel 15-227-0): Lot 12 on Plan Book 60 Plan 25, 0.477 acre, two-family house built about 1873

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.