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Billerica Center Historic District

The Billerica Center Historic District is the local historic district around the Town Common in Billerica Centre, created by town meeting in 1990 under Chapter 40C of the General Laws and overseen by the Billerica Historic Districts Commission. It takes in the Common, the churches, library and town halls on Concord Road, and the houses and stores on Boston Road from the Common south past the Howe School grounds. At its heart is the older National Register district, the Billerica Town Common District, listed on August 14, 1973. The Massachusetts Historical Commission inventory records the local district as BIL.M (local historic district, 1990) and the National Register district as BIL.A.

The National Register district was nominated by the Massachusetts Historical Commission in May 1973, from inventory forms made that year by Carolyn T. Abbott and Eva G. Marshall for the Billerica and Massachusetts Historical Commissions. Its nomination describes it as "bounded by Cummings St., Concord Rd., and Boston Rd.," about twenty acres taking in the Common and the properties facing it: Concord Road from No. 1 to No. 31, Cummings Street from No. 1 to No. 6, and Boston Road from No. 414 to No. 446. The Common itself, "a triangular tract of land over two acres in size," is "the focal center of the district." The buildings around it, "ranging in date from the late 18th to the late 19th century," are in the Federal, Greek Revival, Italianate, Second Empire, High Victorian Gothic and Colonial Revival styles, and the nomination found that they "demonstrate a fine variety of New England vernacular architecture for the 110 years between 1790 and 1900."

The nomination map numbers fourteen properties. The three earliest are Federal houses: the James Abbott House at 432 Boston Road (1796), built by a town clerk and State Representative; the Dr. William Bowers House at 1 Concord Road (1804), now called the Old Providence House, with its "much-published front entrance"; and the Joseph Locke House at 381 Boston Road (1811), home of the lawyer who became the first judge at Lowell when that court was established in 1836. The Greek Revival buildings are the First Baptist Church, built in 1828 and moved to the Common in 1844; the First Parish Church, built in 1797, remodeled in the Greek Revival style in 1844, burned in 1968 and rebuilt in 1970 with its old portico and steeple; and the Luther W. Faulkner House of 1833. The Billerica Masonic Temple was built as a store about 1850, the High Victorian Gothic Bennett Public Library dates from 1880, and the brick Billerica Town Hall (1895), "the largest structure in the district," was finished in 1895 near the site of the town hall that burned in 1893. The others on the map are the Jackson Wright House and the Edward Dickinson House on Cummings Street, the Second Empire Paul Hill House at 446 Boston Road, the late nineteenth-century wooden business block on Boston Road (the Central Block) and the modern business blocks at Boston Road and Andover Road. The Paul Hill House was taken down in 1986 and the Central Block in 1987.

A local district was many years in the making. The selectmen set up a Historic District Study Committee under Charles E. Stearns, chairman of the Billerica Historical Commission, and the 1974 town meeting gave it $1,500. The town's preservation plan of 1982 recommended that the National Register district be enlarged to take in more of the residential architecture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in 1989 the Massachusetts Historical Commission found an enlarged "Billerica Center" district, reaching south along Boston Road, eligible for the National Register. At the fourteenth session of the annual town meeting, on June 7, 1990, the study committee's by-law (Article 36) passed by a vote of 87 to 23, after a petition in its favor from residents and homeowners of the Center area. It established the Billerica Historic Districts Commission and three districts: the Town Center Historic District, the Billerica Mills Historic District and a district at The Corner.

The local district reaches beyond the 1973 boundary, south along Boston Road. Inventory forms place within it the Howe School at 390 Boston Road, listed on the National Register in its own right in 2002, the Howe High School of 1915 at 365 Boston Road, now the Town Hall, the Eleanor Bennett House at 382 Boston Road, the Sarah Lilla Fletcher Murphy House at 372 Boston Road and the Charles E. Morris House at 364 Boston Road, on the corner of Farmers Lane. Neither the by-law nor the commission's reports give a count of the buildings in the local district; its bounds are on the map filed with the Town Clerk.

New building, demolition and exterior changes in view of a public way in the district need a certificate from the commission. In 1994 it reviewed plans for the cupola and roof of the old Town Hall and for the gazebo on the Common, and three new subdivisions within the district; in 1995 it opposed a mini-mall at the corner of Charnstaffe Lane and Boston Road. A community grant of 2017 paid for signs at each of the four entry points to the district, put up in 2018.

Billerica Center Historic District

Billerica Center Historic District

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