Jackson Wright House

The Jackson Wright House is a small two-story dwelling with an attached wheelwright's shop on the south side of the Billerica Common, at 6 Cummings Street. Its lot of about five thousand square feet has been described in nearly the same words in every deed since 1849: about 66 feet "by the road or common" on the north (the road is now Cummings Street), about 82 feet on the west, and a back line drawn a foot and a half behind the house.

The land was part of the corner homestead of Francis Richardson between the Boston and Concord roads, which he bought from William Richardson in 1814. When Francis Richardson mortgaged that homestead in June 1847, one of its lines ran "two feet from the Randall buildings", so the house and shop were already standing and occupied by George W. Randall. Randall had been minister of the First Baptist Church of Billerica in 1841 and 1842 and was working as a carriage maker by 1844. In February 1849 Richardson sold him the lot "with a dwelling house & shop thereon" for $600, bounded south by the Rev. Benjamin Putnam, the Baptist minister of the time, and Randall mortgaged it the same day to Dr. Amariah Preston.

The house then changed hands quickly. Randall, by then of Malden, sold it in 1853 to Charles G. Fletcher, who took over the Preston mortgage; Fletcher sold it in 1856 to Alden B. Richardson, a trader, who sold it the same year for $700 to Arza Page, a carpenter. On 11 February 1861 Page sold "a dwelling house & shop" on the lot to Jackson Wright, also a carpenter, for $700.

Jackson Wright worked here as a wheelwright and carpenter for nearly fifty years. He married Georgiana B. Page, daughter of Phineas Page, and their children included Jennie Gertrude, born in 1869. The town paid him for work on the Town House, a bier and the town clock and for repairing wheels and sharpening mowers between 1865 and 1906, and kept a fire extinguisher at his place around 1890. Hazen's 1880 census figures list a single wheelwrighting establishment in Billerica. In 1894 Georgianna Wright paid Mary L. Dickinson $50 for a small lot of 1,193 square feet behind the house, shown on A. B. Ilsley's April 1894 plan of the Dickinson land at the corner of Boston and Concord roads, where the house lot is marked "Jackson Wright". Jackson Wright died on 24 August 1908.

After the estates of Jackson and Georgianna B. Wright were settled, their daughter Jennie G. Wetherbee of Bedford and her husband Charles C. Wetherbee sold both parcels in September 1923 to Seth A. and Ruth Cole Loring, describing the house lot as on "a road or Common now called Cummings St." Ruth Cole Loring added a relative to the title in 1961. The house was sold to private owners in 1973 and has changed hands several times since, always with the same two parcels.

The deeds correct some earlier accounts. The house is older than the "about 1858" or 1850 dates often given: the house and shop stood by 1847 and were built while George W. Randall had them, not by Jackson Wright, who bought in 1861 (not 1867, as the 1923 deed says). The 1973 survey form recorded the shed as the place "where the wheelwright made his wheels", with a brick chimney as one of its supports, and an occupant remembered an elm in front with an iron ring and chain for tying horses.

References

1. MACRIS BIL.11
2. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), p. 302 (George W. Randall and Benjamin Putnam, Baptist ministers) and Genealogical Register, WRIGHT 5 (Jackson Wright m. Georgiana B. Page; children)

Deed References Expand all

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