Talbot Textile Mills Worker Housing at 56-58 Wilson St

The double house at 56-58 Wilson Street is one of the two-family tenements that C. P. Talbot and Company built for workers at its woolen mills in North Billerica. It stands on Lot 13 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 the matching houses at 60-62 Wilson Street (Lot 14) and 64-66 Wilson Street (Lot 15) 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 Richardson farm" on the west side of the Concord River near the Canal Mills. Mears died in 1828 leaving only minor children, and in March 1832 their guardians had S. Livingston survey the homestead into numbered lots with a lane running through it, and sold the lots at auction on March 20, 1832. Joel Dix bought lot 9, "two acres & one hundred and fifty eight rods" bounded "Southeasterly by Concord River", with lot 8 of Isaiah Bussey to the southwest and lot 10 of Gardner Parker to the north. Dix sold an undivided half of lot 9 to his neighbor Daniel Wilson for $71 on April 3, 1832, and the other half for $150 on February 20, 1848, when the lot was described as "about three acres" running from "the lane that runs through said homestead" to the river, next to the lot "called the lumber yard" that Wilson had bought from Nathaniel Stearns's estate in 1846. The lane became Wilson Street, the lumber-yard acre became Lot 10 of Plan A (44-46 Wilson Street), and Lot 13 most probably lies within the old lot 9.

Daniel Wilson died on November 29, 1861. His administrator, Gardner Parker, sold the homestead farm to James Faulkner in 1863. Parker bought it from Faulkner in 1864 and sold the river end of the farm, 10 acres 39 rods, to Charles P. and Thomas Talbot in 1869. The double houses on Wilson Street do not appear on the 1875 map of the town, but they are drawn on both sides of the street on the June 1881 "Plan of the Property of C. P. Talbot and Company, West Side of Concord River" (Plan Book 4 Plan 59), so this house was built between 1875 and 1881, not about 1860 or 1870 as earlier accounts state. In 1884 the property passed to the corporation The Talbot Mills, which rented the houses to its workers for half a century and enlarged their rear ells when sewers were installed in 1902-03.

The Talbot Mills began selling its village houses in the 1930s. On December 15, 1936 it sold Lot 13, "the land in said Billerica with the buildings thereon situated on the southeasterly side of Wilson Street", 17,624 square feet, to Charles J. and M. Theresa Gibbons of Billerica, who financed the purchase with a $1,700 mortgage to the Union Old Lowell National Bank. This was one of the first sales under Plan A, and its terms, a right of way kept open from Wilson Street through Lots 9 to 17 and a common sewer reserved to the mill, were repeated in the deeds of the neighboring lots sold in 1939. The Gibbons family kept the house until 1964. After two private sales that year, it was bought in 1965 by the Alston Realty Trust, which held it as a rental property for 33 years, transferring it to a new trust of the same name in 1989. The trust sold the house to private owners in 1998. Wilson Street, long a private way through the mill village, was accepted as a public way by the Town in 2024.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.123
2. Billerica assessor record for 56-58 Wilson St (parcel 15-228-0): Lot 13 on Plan Book 60 Plan 25, 0.405 acre, two-family house, deed history from 1965

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.