Talbot Textile Mill Worker Housing at 29-31 Wilson St

The double house at 29-31 Wilson Street is one of the row of two-family mill houses that C. P. Talbot and Company built on the west side of Wilson Street in North Billerica for the workers of the Talbot Mills. It stands on Lot 26 of the 1936 subdivision plan of the mill village, a lot of 9,040 square feet with 90.09 feet on the street, between Lot 25 (33-35 Wilson Street) to the south and Lot 27 (25-27 Wilson Street) to the north, and backing on the right of way that runs behind the row from Elm Street.

The land was part of the Richardson farm at the old Richardson's Mills, which Thomas Richardson sold with the mills to the committee of the Middlesex Canal in 1794. The canal proprietors sold 27 acres of the farm to Nathan Mears in 1819. After Mears died in 1828 his homestead was surveyed into lots and sold at auction in 1832, and Daniel Wilson bought the lots west of the passage way that is now Wilson Street. Wilson farmed the land until his death in 1861. His administrator, Gardner Parker, sold the homestead farm at auction in 1863, and through a straw deed took it himself in 1864.

In 1869 Parker sold Charles P. Talbot and Thomas Talbot "ten acres and thirty nine rods ... being a part of the homestead of the late Daniel Wilson", running back from the lane to the wall that is still the rear line of the west-side house lots. No buildings are named in that deed, and the double house appears on the 1875 map and in the row of houses drawn on the 1881 plan of the property of C. P. Talbot and Company, so it was built between 1869 and 1875, probably about 1873. This is later than the "ca. 1865" given in the 1974 inventory form, which took the date from the old maps. In 1884 the Talbot heirs and Thomas Talbot conveyed the mills and the village to The Talbot Mills, and the company rented the house to its workers for the next half century.

In the fall of 1936 The Talbot Mills began selling its houses on Wilson Street by the lots of Plan "A", surveyed by J. C. and W. T. Monahan. On September 30, 1936 the company sold Lot 26 "with the buildings thereon" to John Mackey of Billerica for about $1,000, reserving the common sewer and keeping the right of way behind the row "forever kept open for the common use and benefit of the abutters thereon". Mackey owned the house free of any recorded mortgage for fourteen years and sold it in November 1950.

The house has since passed through private owners: it was sold in 1963, when it was described as "now supposed to be numbered 29-31", and in 1979 for $45,000 to the couple who were renting it. The 1963 buyers were the owners when the town's historical commission recorded the house in 1974. It was transferred for a nominal sum in 1998, when the owner kept a life estate, and twice more in 2007, and every deed has repeated the bounds and the sewer reservation of the 1936 sale. In 2024 the Town accepted Wilson Street as a public way.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.102
2. Billerica assessor record for 29-31 Wilson St (parcel 15-219-0): Lot 26 on Plan Book 60 Plan 25, 0.208 acre, two-family house built about 1873, deed history from 1979

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.