William Hamlet House (1656)

This is the house of William Hamlet on his 1656 house lot on the north-east side of Boston Road, opposite Bare Hill, as it stood before Caleb Farley enlarged it. Hamlet, from Cambridge, was one of the first two settlers to take a house lot off the Township, in 1656. On May 20, 1679 he 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," so a house and a barn already called old stood on the lot by then.

Charles E. Stearns of the Billerica Historical Commission noted in 1973 that the great chimney, set in front of the ridgepole, marked a very early house that had been enlarged. His best guess was that Hamlet may have started the house and that Farley, who had ten children, brought it to something near its later form after 1679. The later history of the house is told under William Hamlet House.