Water body

Vine Brook

Vine Brook rises in Lexington and flows north and northwest through Lexington, Burlington and Bedford to the Shawsheen River. Its source is a spring near the Old Reservoir off Marrett Road in Lexington; it runs north through Lexington Center and Butterfield's Pond on the Lexington and Burlington line, passes in a culvert under the shopping malls at the Middlesex Turnpike in Burlington, crosses into Bedford, goes under Route 3 near Burlington Road (Route 62), fills Wilson Mill Pond, and joins the Shawsheen in the east part of Bedford. Only its last stretch, in Bedford, lay in Billerica, in the part of the old town that became Bedford in 1729.

The brook is in the oldest records of Shawshin. When Simon Willard and Edward Converse viewed the land for the General Court in 1642, their circuit began at the "Shawshin house," which Henry A. Hazen placed "on the Shawshin river, in Bedford, at the place where Vine brook, 'the riveret from Woburne,' empties into it"; he called it the first building in the town. On May 9, 1644 the Court ordered that the river be called the Shawshin "not only belowe, but also above the riveret w^th falls into said ryver in Wooburne bounds above halfe a mile from Cambridge line," a ruling that fixed the western bound of Woburn, and Hazen identified that riveret as "Vine brook, as it is now known." Among the great farms granted along the Woburn line, Daniel Gookin's grant of five hundred acres lay "near the mouth of Vine Brook, and mostly east of the river," and Mr. Mitchell's farm lay southeast of it. John Trull, Hazen reports, had been a tenant on Gookin's farm "on Shawshin river and Vine brook" before he took up land in the town about 1658.

The brook's fall gave the south part of Billerica an early mill. John Wilson, a Woburn man, had a saw-mill on Vine Brook by 1680 and a "corne mill" there by 1683; on May 21, 1683 the town declared itself "willing to give one day work of each man in ye town, & of teams of those that have them, for the making a sufficient way to John Wilson's corn-mill," and in 1685 it granted him thirty acres southeast of the Shawshin on the Woburn line "for encouragement towards his corn-mill." The mill long bore his name. When Bedford was set off in 1729, the two towns negotiated over whether the mill site would stay in Billerica, and it went to Bedford. The Gleason and Blodget families later ran the mill; in 1840 it became James Munroe's coarse paper mill, which burned in 1846, and from 1847 the site was used for making blinds and sashes and for sawing.

Old Burlington Road, which crosses the brook at the mill, was laid out to reach it. Route 3 and the Route 62 interchange cut away much of the mill pond. Bedford bought the land around the pond in 1999 and 2000; the Wilson Mill and Old Burlington Road Historic District, with the pond, dam, stone-lined channel, mill foundations and the Old Burlington Road bridge over the brook, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on August 18, 2003; and the town rebuilt the dam and opened Wilson Mill Park in 2013. Upstream the brook still floods in heavy rain, as in March 2010, when it overflowed in Lexington.

The name Vine Brook was also used in Billerica for another stream. A deed of gift dated February 4, 1733/4 from Ensign William Manning to his son gives land "on the West side of Concord River" lying "on the south side of the County Road and on both sides Vine Brook," a brook in present Billerica that has nothing to do with this one.

Vine Brook

Vine Brook

References