Billerica Garden Suburb

The Billerica Garden Suburb is a neighborhood in North Billerica between the Boston and Maine Railroad and the Concord River, north of Faulkner Street. It was organized as Billerica Garden Suburb, Inc., incorporated on June 14, 1914 by the Rev. Charles H. Williams, the English-born pastor of the North Billerica Baptist Church, to build houses for the workmen of the Boston and Maine Railroad repair shops then going up nearby. The company combined a limited-dividend corporation with a partnership of the workers who would live there, on the model of the English co-partnership tenant societies.

The land was 26.05 acres of Williams's, shown on a "Plan of Land in North Billerica, Mass., belonging to Chas. H. Williams," surveyed by Smith and Brooks, civil engineers, of Lowell in June 1914 and recorded on July 7, 1914 (Plan Book 31, Plan 82), between the Concord River, the Boston and Lowell Railroad and the Faulkner Manufacturing Company. The suburb was planned by Arthur C. Comey, with Warren H. Manning as advisory landscape designer; Manning's office sketch map is dated July 29, 1914. Its streets were named for the English garden cities and villages it imitated: Letchworth Avenue, Hampstead Avenue, Port Sunlight Road, Brentham Road and Ilford Road, with Mason Avenue as the entrance street and Indian Road along the river side.

Houses went up quickly, about seventy by 1917. In 1916 the town voted, on Williams's motion, to accept the suburb's streets when satisfactory to the selectmen, and accepted them on February 14, 1920. Indian Road became Indian Knoll Road in the renaming of duplicate street names in 1988.

Historic Buildings

Name	Alternate	Address	Built	Moved	Demolished
William E. Faulkner House		3 Mason Av	1826	1857
Faulkner Barn		6-8 Mason Av	1860
Faulkner Manufacturing Company Worker Housing at 10-12 Letchworth Av		10-12 Letchworth Av	1870
Faulkner Manufacturing Company Worker Housing at 6-8 Letchworth Av		6-8 Letchworth Av	1870
Edward O. and Amy A. Anderson House	Donald L. Pickering and Elaine Davidson House	7 Brentham Rd	1915
Residence at 2-4 Mason Av		2-4 Mason Av	1925
Williams Barn		2-4 Letchworth Av	1925