Two Brothers Rocks-Dudley Road Historic District

The Two Brothers Rocks-Dudley Road Historic District is a rural historic district of about 230 acres on the east bank of the Concord River, straddling the line between Bedford and Billerica. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 23, 2010. About two-thirds of its land is in Billerica, in South Billerica, and one-third in Bedford. It follows Dudley Road, a winding road lined with stone walls and fields, from State Route 4 in Bedford northwest toward the river, across Mill Brook just north of the town line, and back northeast to Nashua Road in Billerica; in Billerica it reaches to Timber Creek Lane. Dudley Road has been a designated scenic road in Billerica since 1977.

The district takes its name from the Two Brothers, a pair of boulders on the river bank in Bedford that marked the division of the great farms granted to Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley and Governor John Winthrop in 1638, and later, from 1729, the line between Billerica and Bedford. The rocks were inscribed with the date 1638 and the names of the farms in 1894. Dudley's farm, which Hazen described as "beginning at the Two Brothers, on Concord River," became the southern part of Billerica. The nomination traces the district from these grants through a sawmill run by the Stearns family on Mill Brook from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, the Federal and early nineteenth-century estates, the farms and summer places of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and suburban houses of the 1950s; its period of significance runs from about 1638 to 1960.

The nomination counts 31 contributing resources (15 buildings, 2 sites, 10 structures and 4 objects) and 34 noncontributing (19 buildings, 12 structures and 3 objects). The Billerica buildings are the three Stearns houses: the Captain John Stearns House at 96 Dudley Road, by family tradition of 1689 and the oldest Stearns house standing in Billerica, later Greenwood Farm; the Lt. John Stearns House at 77 Dudley Road, of the mid-eighteenth century, which from 1933 was the administration building of the Maryknoll novitiate and from 1964 belonged to the Daughters of St. Paul; and the brick Abner Stearns House at 141 Dudley Road (about 1796 to 1805, renovated in 1924 for the Pickman family). The religious complex built for the Daughters of St. Paul in 1979 and 1980 (the Maryknoll Novitiate site) is set back from the road and counted as noncontributing. In Billerica the district also takes in the Stearns mill site with its stone spillway on Mill Brook, the Dudley Road bridge over the brook, a farm road bridge and a witness mark boulder by the town line. The Bedford part holds the Two Brothers Rocks, the Walcott-Pickman House (1837 to 1839) and other Pickman estate buildings, and part of the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.

About forty percent of the district is public open space. In Billerica this includes the Governor Thomas Dudley Park, made in 1988 from three parcels of the former Heatherwood Estates, which were sold to the Commonwealth and the town.

References

1. National Register nomination, Two Brothers Rocks-Dudley Road Historic District (NRIS 10000790), entered September 23, 2010: 31 contributing and 34 noncontributing resources
2. Wikipedia: Two Brothers Rocks-Dudley Road Historic District, Bedford and Billerica, listed on the National Register in 2010
3. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883): the Dudley farm "beginning at the Two Brothers, on Concord River," and the early settlers of the south part of the town