Fairbrother-Brown House

The Fairbrother-Brown House is a two-family mill house on the northwest side of Wilson Street in North Billerica, one of the double houses that C. P. Talbot and Company built for the workers of its woolen mill on the Concord River. It stands on Lot 23 of the mill village plan of 1926-1936, an 11,630 square foot lot with 91 feet on the street.

The land was once part of Thomas Richardson's farm at the mills, which he sold to the Middlesex Canal in 1794. The canal proprietors sold 27 acres of it to Nathan Mears in 1819, and after his death the guardians of his children sold the lots west of the "passage way" that became Wilson Street to Daniel Wilson in 1832. Wilson farmed the land until his death in 1861. His administrator, Gardner Parker, sold the farm at auction in 1863, took it back the next year, and in 1869 sold "ten acres and thirty nine rods ... being a part of the homestead of the late Daniel Wilson" to Charles P. Talbot and Thomas Talbot. That tract became the west side of the mill village.

The double house went up on the Talbots' land in the 1870s. It is not on the 1875 map of the town but is drawn on the June 1881 plan of the company's property, and the assessor dates it to about 1873. According to the family, William Fairbrother, a mill worker who married about 1872, moved into one half of the house "when the house was new", with his brother-in-law, a Brown, in the other half. William's wife Isabella R. Fairbrother died in 1902, and he married Margaret Owens of North Billerica in 1905. In 1884 the Talbot family conveyed the mill village to the newly formed Talbot Mills corporation, which went on renting the houses to its workers for another half century.

In 1936 The Talbot Mills began selling the houses on Wilson Street to their occupants, lot by lot, under Plan "A". Lot 23 was sold on November 2, 1939, for about $1,500 judging by the revenue stamps, to William's grandson Charles E. Fairbrother Jr. and his wife Mary E. Fairbrother, "with the buildings thereon", subject to the shared right of way behind the lots from Elm Street to Wilson Street and to the company's common sewer. Other members of the family bought nearby houses at the same time, among them Katie Fairbrother, who bought Lot 24 next door (37-39 Wilson Street) in 1936 and later held it jointly with Henry F. and Mary E. Brown. Charles E. Fairbrother Jr. served on the Billerica School Committee in the 1930s. The couple mortgaged the house to the Billerica Trust Company in 1941 and to savings banks several times between 1951 and 1961, but never sold it. When the Billerica Historical Commission surveyed the house in 1974, they were living in one half, the third generation of Fairbrothers to do so.

Mary E. Fairbrother died on September 7, 1986 and Charles E. Fairbrother Jr. on October 19, 1987. In 1990 their three children sold the house for $120,000, half to a family member and his wife at 43 Wilson Street and half to the household living at 41 Wilson Street, as tenants in common. In 2008 the Fairbrother half passed to the owners of the other half, who own the whole house today. The house is a contributing building in the North Billerica Historic District (National Register, 1983) and the local historic district (1992).

References

1. MACRIS BIL.219
2. Billerica assessor record for 41-43 Wilson St (parcel 15-216-0): Lot 23 on Plan Book 60 Plan 25, 0.267 acre, two-family house built about 1873, deed history from 1939

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.