William Hamlet House

The William Hamlet House was one of the oldest houses in Billerica, a low farmhouse on the north-east side of Boston Road (Route 3A) opposite the slope of Bare Hill, south-east of the village. Its "great chimney, anterior to the ridgepole" marked it as a very early house that had been enlarged, and the Historical Commission judged it "almost certainly 17th century in origin." It was taken down in the early 1980s, and a car wash now stands on the lot.

William Hamlet, from Cambridge, was one of the first two settlers to take a house lot off the Township, in 1656: fifty-six acres "on the North-East corner of bare hill, and on ye south of hogrooten meadow," bounded west by Simon Crosby, south by Thomas Foster, north by Joseph Tompson and Peter Brackett, and east by the commons. On May 20, 1679 Hamlet and his wife Sarah exchanged homesteads with Caleb Farley of Woburn, giving him "one Dwelling house and old Barn and about forty four or forty six acres," the house lot the town had granted him, less a part already sold to his son-in-law James Frost. The deed was acknowledged in 1684 and not recorded until 1707. It shows that a house, and a barn already called old, stood on the lot by 1679. Hazen, who also dated the exchange 1679, and the 1973 survey, which settled on "circa 1700," both left open how much of the later house Hamlet built. Both families were Baptists, and Hamlet's part in the Baptist movement near Boston may explain the move.

Caleb Farley gave the Hamlet place to his son Enoch by a deed of gift that was never recorded; his will, made at Roxbury in 1711, says only that he had already settled land on his sons by deed. On Feb. 15, 1713/14 Enoch sold to his brother Ebenezer Farley, for 230 pounds, "all that land which was granted to William Hamlet in his Homestead ... with all the Buildings fences & trees." In 1728, the year he died, Ebenezer gave the place to his son-in-law John Shed Jr.. That deed was not recorded either, but Shed's bond of the same year, promising to keep Ebenezer's widow on a third of the income of "that Place or Situation which his said Father has given him a Deed of," survives in the registry, as does the widow's release of her dower in 1736. The Sheds probably lived on the Jefts place north of the village, and in 1745 they sold the sixty acres on the County road to Woburn to Benjamin Tompson for 1,150 pounds old tenor. Tompson left all his lands to his son William in 1753.

How the house passed from the Tompsons to the Wilsons is not recorded. By 1783 Mary, wife of Seth Wilson, held a homestead of about twenty-eight acres on the east side of the Boston road, with William Tompson to the north, in her own right: it is not in her husband's inventory. In 1793 she gave "my homestead which Contains the buildings" to her son Seth, keeping it for her life, and on Jan. 17, 1803 she sold "thirty acres more or less with a dwelling house and a barn thereon" to Stephen and Silas Richardson for $1,000, while Seth sold them the eight acre "hill pasture" across the road. Silas released his half to Stephen, a carpenter, in 1806. Stephen mortgaged the farm to the Salem Bank and others, and in 1816 a deputy sheriff sold his interest in "a tract of land containing thirty acres more or less with the buildings thereon" at auction for $735 to Isaac Kendall and Harvey Crosby. After Kendall died his administrator sold his half, "with a dwelling house and barn thereon," to Crosby in 1818.

The farm was Harvey Crosby's "Home Place" for the rest of his life. Heavily mortgaged, he conveyed it with all his other land in 1849 to John S. Edgerly of Somerville and Henry Crosby, who cleared the family mortgages in 1855, and in 1871 Edgerly released the house farm, by then described as sixty-one acres "on the east side of the road leading to Boston," to William Crosby of Cambridge. William mortgaged it the same year. In 1886 the mortgage was foreclosed and the farm, "together with the buildings thereon," was sold at auction on the premises to Henry Crosby for $2,750. Henry died within the year, and his heir Frances E. Crosby of Malden sold it in 1887 to William's wife Treinetta, who in 1891 deeded it to their daughter Trinetta A. Crosby. Trinetta owned it for half a century, losing small strips to the county's relocation of the Boston road in 1916 and to the state's rebuilding of Route 3A in 1931. After her death her brothers Charles H. and Lewis A. Crosby sold the sixty-one acres "with the buildings thereon" in December 1943 to the family who still lived in the house, with nursery stock and an ice cream stand beside it, when the Historical Commission recorded it in 1973.

The Commission's surveyor noted that year that "some day some one will want to straighten Route 3A right through this house." The owners divided off parts of the frontage in 1974 and, in 1980, the house lot itself into Lots A, B and C; the 1980 plan still shows the old house near the line between Lots A and B. Lot B, 2.1 acres, passed through two private sales and in 1983 to Burlington Car Wash, Inc., which built the present car wash in 1984. The date usually given for the demolition is 1982.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.197
2. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883): William Hamlet's 1656 grant and the Farley and Crosby families

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.