James Whittemore House

The James Whittemore House stands at 16 Mt. Pleasant Street in North Billerica, on the corner of Billerica Avenue. The land was part of the holdings of Lyman Haynes, Anthony Jones and Dudley Foster, the North Billerica partners who bought up land around the village in the 1850s and 1860s. In September 1864 they sold James Scott of Lowell a quarter acre "on the Road leading from the R. R. Depot to Thomas Talbot's House", the road that became Mt. Pleasant Street, next to land of C. P. Talbot & Co., for $102. A month later Scott bought the acre behind it for $100, and in April 1865 a twelve-foot strip running back from the road to Tewksbury, for a passage to his back land. None of these deeds mentions a building.

By the time Scott sold the three lots to James Whittemore of Billerica on September 30, 1870, the price had risen to $2,000, against the $222 Scott had paid for the bare land, so the house had been built in the meantime, probably by Scott soon after 1864. Whittemore, a New Hampshire-born laborer who had married Mary C. Stevenson in Billerica in 1844, was the station agent at North Billerica and was appointed its postmaster on May 25, 1866, serving until 1878. The 1875 map shows the house as "J. Whittemore".

Whittemore, a widower by 1877, sold his land off in pieces to his neighbor Amos Gray: a strip 64 feet wide on the east side for $50 in 1877, and in 1891 the rear land for $200, "Reserving to myself the income from said land so long as I live". By then the town had laid out Billerica Avenue as "the new Town Road" across the west side of his land, paying him $25 in land damages in 1890. What was left was the house on its quarter acre at the corner.

Whittemore died between 1891 and early 1896. His heirs, five relatives in Amesbury and Ona Ackerman of Barnard, Missouri, whose guardian sold her sixth at auction under a probate license, sold the corner lot "with the buildings thereon" to James Murphy of Lowell on January 18, 1896 for $2,025. The same day Murphy deeded it to the Talbot Mills, the woolen mill on the Concord River, and for the next 41 years the house was company housing.

When the Talbot Mills sold off its village houses in the 1930s, the lot became Lot 72 on the company's 1936 plan of North Billerica (Plan Book 60, Plan 31), 14,066 square feet. The mills sold it in March 1937 to Harold W. and Susan G. Shaw, who sold it in 1939 to Walter F. Connor of Lowell. Connor sold it in 1948 to Thomas F. and Minnie B. Fairbrother, and in 1951 it was bought by a family that kept it for about fifty years. It was sold to its present private owners in 2002.

The historic survey dates the house to about 1865, but the deeds show that James Scott bought the land in 1864 and 1865 and that Whittemore bought the finished house in 1870. How Haynes, Jones and Foster acquired the land before 1864 is not settled; it may have been part of the 52-acre "Plain lot" they bought from Calvin Rogers in 1858.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.284
2. Billerica assessor, 16 Mt. Pleasant St (parcel 10-72-0): Lot 72 on Plan 60-31, 0.323 acres, sales history
3. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883): James Whittemore appointed postmaster at North Billerica May 25, 1866

Deed References Expand all

Recorded is Book/Page at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds unless noted.