Town Brook

Town Brook rises at Billerica Center, behind the houses on the west side of Boston Road just south of the Common, and runs south and then west to the Concord River. From its head near the corner of Boston Road and Concord Road it passes, for much of the way in pipe, under Charnstaffe Lane, flows through Mitchell Pond beside Kenmar Drive and on toward Fardon Street, and then turns west across Concord Road and the Middlesex Turnpike to reach the river near Elsie Avenue; a branch comes in from the south by Federal Street. Almost its whole course lies within the bounds of Thomas Dudley's farm, the first great grant in the south of the town, whose northeast line ran along Charnstaffe Lane.

The head of the brook was put to work early. The lot behind the Nathaniel Davidson House at 419 Boston Road was a tannery by 1725, when the tanner James Barrett owned it; Edward Jewett, tanner, held it from 1735, and in 1747 Nathaniel Davidson sold the back half acre "with all the Buildings and Tan fatts thereon," with a twelve-foot road down to them, to the tanner John Parker. A Historical Society notice of 1974 says that John Parker "bought the tanning vats at the head of Blanchard Brook," and the Parker tan yard and its lane bounded the neighboring lots into the 1830s. The Historical Commission's account of the Center describes the first house lots facing the two roads from the south "with a strip of common land between them along Blanchard Brook."

Henry A. Hazen wrote in 1883 that Indian "graves and the site of a wigwam are still shown north of Jaquith Brook, near Concord River." He placed "the Jaquith place" southwest of the village, near the house of George Farley at the north end of the Dudley farm, which is the country this brook drains, and in 1865 the town paid B. H. Heald $36 for "repairing culvert at Jaquith's brook." Jaquith Brook was very probably an earlier name of this stream, though no record fixes it. In 1973 Robert E. Valyou of the Historical Commission recorded a possible prehistoric site of the Archaic and Woodland periods on "Blanchard Brook, south of Charnstaff Lane," on the low ground beside the lane.

Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the stream was Blanchard Brook. The records do not explain the name; Sarah (Stickney) Blanchard bought a new house at 421 Boston Road, on the edge of the old tan yard, in 1837, and her son William Blanchard, merchant and postmaster, bought the house next door the same day, but no record ties the brook to them. The warrant printed in the 1908 report asked the town to declare "the Blanchard and Stearns brooks a main drain or common sewer," and at the annual meeting of 1909 the town raised $300 and declared both brooks main sewers, instructing the selectmen "to hire a competent engineer so that this work may be done in a comprehensive plan." Small sums for "the Stearns and Blanchard Brooks" then appear in nearly every year's accounts. In 1910 the highway surveyor Harry W. Essex opened a ditch on Blanchard Brook "1,215 feet long and four feet wide" and put 90 feet of pipe in Charnstaff Lane. The town voted $600 for "permanent repairs on Blanchard Brook" in 1922, a job finished the next year, but in 1923 it refused $1,000 for "cleaning out the Blanchard Brook below Charnstaff Lane." In 1925 the brook was cleaned and the grass and brush cut "to Mitchell's land," and the surveyor recommended "that this Brook be piped and do away with this annual cleaning"; the next year the town voted $800 to extend the drain pipe, and the brook was "opened for a distance of several hundred feet and a large sized pipe installed," at a point "where in the past there has been much complaint."

In 1947 the town voted $500 to clear Blanchard Brook and told the selectmen to examine its condition and report to the Board of Health. The next year Town Meeting asked Albert Warren Stearns to bring in "a proper name or designation for the two town brooks, one going north, and one going south," and in March 1949, on the report of his Committee on Brooks, it voted that "the brook arising in the land of the late Mr. Sidney A. Bull, coursing in a southerly direction between Concord Road and Boston Road and ultimately reaching the Concord River, be officially named the Town Brook, from its source to the river, and that all other names be abandoned for official purposes." The same vote named Stearns Brook, the brook that runs north from the Center. The old name held on in the accounts: in 1952 the town voted $1,000 "to clean the Blanchard and Stearns Brooks" on a rising vote of 182 to 73, and from 1955 to 1961 it voted about $1,000 a year for "cleaning and piping" Blanchard Brook. The public works report for 1957 lists "further drainage at Town Brook near Charnstaffe Lane," and the warrant that year asked also for "repairing rock culvert under Charnstaffe Lane." In 1962 the Board of Health reported that six dwellings "where sewage was draining into Blanchard Brook" had been corrected.

In 1973, on an article of the Board of Health, Town Meeting rescinded the action of 1908 and declared the Blanchard and Stearns Brooks "to be no longer main sewers." The town engineers designed drainage on Blanchard Brook in 1979 and built it in 1980, and in 1986 the town engineer wrote that "a new culvert is needed on Concord Road at Blanchard Brook," a project he hoped to fund under the state's Chapter 91 program. Today the upper brook runs mostly in pipe and culverts through the house lots south of the Center, Mitchell Pond lies on its course near Kenmar Drive, and the lower brook runs in the open through low woods to the Concord River.

Town Brook

Town Brook

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