North Cemetery

Location	Map
Laid Out	1816

The North Cemetery lies on the north side of Salem Road just east of Pollard Street, beside the Boston and Lowell railroad. The Billerica Historical Commission, asked by the cemetery commissioners in 1976 to search the town records, gave its official name and date as "North Cemetery (est. 1816)." It should not be confused with the older "north burying ground" that John Farmer recorded as "located" on April 4, 1707, "five rods on the road, and twenty rods in length," which is the Old Corner Burying Ground on Pollard Street. The ways inside the cemetery are its driveways, and they have never had names.

The cemetery was enlarged several times. In 1883 Judith Jones, widow of Anthony Jones, sold the town a tract 200 feet deep along its north side "adjoining the North Cemetery," and in 1913 the town accepted from J. Nelson Parker, chairman of the cemetery commission, "a strip of land adjoining the North Cemetery" bought from the Boston and Maine Railroad, "to be used for cemetery purposes only." The town's Cemetery Commission, formed about 1899, had a topographical plan made of "the new portion of the Fox Hill and North grounds" and urged "the completion of the driveways." In 1903 Miss Abby L. Faulkner gave $1,500, "about $300 of which has already been expended on driveways," the income of the rest to be spent "for still further improving the roads in the North Cemetery," since "the shaping of the roads was necessary before a proper construction of lots." More work was done on the driveways of the newer part in 1906.

By 1934 few lots were left, the land being "very ledgy," and the commissioners began laying out lots "in the strip along the main driveway that it was originally intended should be reserved for planting"; in 1935 new lots improved "the appearance of the first transverse driveway," and in 1937 the secondary entrance was regraded. In 1950 the commissioners noted that the North Cemetery and Fox Hill were "approached by ascending driveways which wash badly during heavy rains," and in 1953 "a beginning was made toward hot-topping the driveways at the North Cemetery." In 1962 the Boston and Maine refused to sell land for a further enlargement, and burials have since been concentrated at Fox Hill Cemetery.

The cemetery's driveways are internal ways owned by the town as part of the burial ground, not streets: they were never laid out, named or accepted as town ways, and they appear in none of the street lists of 1897, 1899 or 1956 or the 1831 list accepted in 2016.

North Cemetery

North Cemetery

References