Billerica Memorial High School Driveway

Location	Map
Laid Out	1973

Billerica Memorial High School Driveway is the driveway of Billerica Memorial High School, 35 River Street, in Billerica Centre. It leaves the north side of River Street west of Boston Road and runs north about 470 feet into the school grounds, beside the site of the school's first building, the Memorial Building. It is a school drive on town land, not a town way; its course and its name are taken from OpenStreetMap.

The school grounds were chosen at the adjourned annual town meeting of March 21, 1953, which voted unanimously that the site of the new high school "be in Billerica Center and be determined as certain land off River Street," about twenty acres in three lots on a "Plan of land for proposed high school in Billerica" surveyed in January 1953 by Albert A. Miller and Wilbur C. Nylander, and appropriated $19,000 to buy or take it. A special town meeting on May 6, 1955 named the school Billerica Memorial High School, and it opened on September 26, 1955 for nearly 700 high school students. The town voted at a special meeting early in 1973 to spend $10,300,000 on a large addition, the "New Addition," and on renovating the Memorial and Howe Buildings; the work was under way that year.

At a special town election on March 5, 2016 the voters approved a debt exclusion for a new Billerica Memorial High School of 325,000 square feet on the same site, "inclusive of abatement and demolition of the existing high school structures; new parking lots, fields and a stadium complex." The new building opened in the fall of 2019, and at the end of the 2018-19 school year the schools said goodbye "to the old BMHS (the Memorial Building and the 'New Addition')," which were later demolished. Whether the drive kept its course through the rebuilding was not determined.

Billerica Memorial High School Driveway

Billerica Memorial High School Driveway

References