Whittemore Terrace

Whittemore Terrace is a short dead-end street running north from Riverdale Road near its western end, in the Riverdale section between Allen Road and the Shawsheen River. It lies in the Riverdale development of the civil engineer Edgar P. Sellew, whose plans of 1903 to 1913 laid out Riverdale, Sylvan, Hillside and the other roads of the neighborhood, but none of the Sellew plans examined shows it, and no recorded plan naming it has been found. The first record of it is the directory of 1931, which lists "WHITMORE TERRACE off Riverdale rd n Allen rd (Riverdale)"; the oldest house on it is dated by the assessors to about 1920.

The origin of the name has not been found. The 1931 directory spells it Whitmore, and the present spelling Whittemore appears by 1962. No record connects it with a Riverdale landowner or with any of the several Whittemore families of Billerica, and it should not be taken to honor any particular person without further evidence.

The street remained a private way for nearly ninety years. At the annual fall town meeting of October 3, 2019, under Article 39, the town voted 165 to 5 to accept as public ways a list of roads that included "Whittemore Terrace, from Riverdale Road to dead end, approximate length 170' and 40' width right of way," as shown on a roadway survey by Lighthouse Land Surveying dated September 4, 2019 (Engineering Division Plan B-4-274). It was not on the town map of 1831 and was not among the roads accepted in 2016.