Oliver P. Greenwood

Died	1966-04-01
School Committee
In Office	1923 - 1929 1950 - 1956
Finance Committee
In Office	1939 - 1941 1949 - 1949
Town Meeting
In Office	1956 - 1967
Housing Authority
In Office	1963 - 1966

Oliver P. Greenwood (died 1966) was a Billerica Centre machinist and inventor who served the town for half a century on its school, finance and housing boards. He was chairman of the School Committee in the 1920s and again in the 1950s, chairman of the Finance Committee, a Town Meeting member and, at his death, a member of the Housing Authority, whose first project, the town's housing for the elderly on River Street, was named for him. By 1912 he was president of the Weymesit Club, listed among the societies of the First Congregational Church, and in 1913, when the Billerica Water Board organized with Sidney A. Bull as chairman, he was chosen clerk of the board; the water accounts list his salary through 1916, along with a small payment for preparing "contracts, specifications, and copies." In the town election of 1913 he ran for a two-year seat on the School Committee and lost to A. Warren Stearns, 263 votes to 253.

On October 26, 1913, he married Ida B. Turner of Billerica, and two daughters were born to them. Ida died on April 2, 1927, at the age of 39, and on November 2, 1928, he married Elizabeth F. Goggin of Lowell; in the 1950s "Mrs. Oliver P. Greenwood" was often at the piano when town meeting opened with "The Star Spangled Banner." In 1912 he bought two lots on Andover Street from Louise F. Rand, and in 1914 he and his wife took a deed from Ethel A. Morse, an earlier owner of the house now numbered 24 Andover Road. He remodeled that house in the 1920s into its present form, and the Historical Commission later recorded it as the Oliver P. Greenwood House.

Greenwood ran a machine shop at the Centre, and when the Talbot School needed its manual training room in 1915 the manual training equipment was moved into "the vacant building formerly used as a machine shop by Mr. O. P. Greenwood at the Center." He took out a series of patents as a resident of Billerica: a distributing machine, applied for in September 1912 and granted in 1920; a machine and process for affixing covering material to forms such as boxes, filed in 1920 and assigned to the Farrington Manufacturing Company, followed by a patent on a covered box in 1923; and, with Hoyland B. Bettinger of Waltham, a refrigerator lining and method of making it, filed in 1927 and assigned to the Saco-Lowell Shops of Lowell. The jury list of 1922 gave his occupation simply as "Inventor."

Elected to the School Committee in 1923 and re-elected in 1926, he was its chairman in 1925 and 1926, serving with Mary L. Stowers and Maurice A. Buck while Eugene C. Vining was superintendent, and as chairman he presented the diplomas at the Howe High School graduations. In 1925 town meeting put him on the building committee for the addition to the Talbot School in North Billerica with Dr. Buck, Thomas F. Sheridan, Ivory M. Hanson and Wallace W. Brown. Their report of January 10, 1927, which he signed, explains that the four-room addition was given a boiler room large enough for a future sixteen-room building and a first floor "strong enough to carry second story," under a temporary roof, so that the upper rooms could be added cheaply later, and it urged that future school building "be done as part of a definite expansion program."

He returned to town office in the years that followed. He was chairman of the Finance Committee in 1940 and served on it again in 1949, and in 1950 he went back on the School Committee, serving as chairman in 1951 and again from 1953 and once more conferring the diplomas at the high school graduations. From the 1950s he was an elected Town Meeting member, and he sat on the local draft board and on special committees, among them the 1962 committee on the feasibility of a town counsel. In 1963 town meeting voted unanimously to rezone the land at 452 to 464 Boston Road, owned by him and Laurence J. Greenwood, from neighborhood residence to general business, and that year the two men sold the Greenwood Building at 462 Boston Road, long held by the Greenwood family, to the Middlesex County National Bank.

When the Billerica Housing Authority was formed in 1963 he was elected to it and served as its treasurer under chairman Joseph H. Johnson. He died on April 1, 1966, the day the Authority signed its financial agreement with the State Housing Board for its first project; the members wrote that they were "both pleased and saddened on this day," Greenwood "having passed away in the morning." The Authority named the project the Oliver P. Greenwood Housing for Senior Citizens. Its construction contract was signed on February 23, 1967, and by December 1, 1968, all 64 apartments on River Street were occupied. At the 1967 annual town meeting the voters stood in silence in his memory as a "community leader." In June 1966 the executrices of his will joined Laurence J. Greenwood, surviving trustee under the will of George P. Greenwood, in conveying the Greenwood farm on Dudley Road to Laurence.

Oliver P. Greenwood

Oliver P. Greenwood

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