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Billerica Mills Historic District

The Billerica Mills Historic District is the historic district of the mill village of North Billerica, at the falls of the Concord River, where the Talbot and Faulkner woolen mills stood on either bank. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 10, 1983, as the "Billerica Mills Historic District (preferred)," with "North Billerica" as its common name, and it is also a local historic district, one of the three created by the town's Historic Districts By-Law of June 7, 1990. The name North Billerica Historic District is sometimes used for it, but it is not the name of the listing. The Massachusetts Historical Commission inventory records the area as BIL.E and the National Register district as BIL.O, with the local district dated September 24, 1992.

The nomination, prepared in July 1983 by Virginia A. Fitch of the Massachusetts Historical Commission with Mary E. Myer of the Northern Middlesex Area Commission and Charles E. Stearns of the Billerica Historical Commission, describes about seventy-five acres "roughly bounded by Concord River, Treble Cove, O Terr, Kohlrausch Ave, Indian Rd, Holt, Ruggles, and Rogers Sts," or generally Colson Street on the west, Rogers Street on the east, Cove Terrace on the south and Indian Road on the north. The eighteenth-century roads now called Rogers Street, Faulkner Street, Elm Street and Colson Street run through it. The nomination counts 123 structures, 15 of them intrusions, so that about 108 contribute to the district, besides the Kohlrausch playground, the Talbot Oval and the remains of the Middlesex Canal. The town enlarged the local district in 1992 by three parcels on Assessor's Plate 10.

The nomination traces the district from the first mill dam, built in 1708 by Christopher Osgood. The mill pond was the main water supply of the Middlesex Canal from 1794, and the canal trench still holds water. Francis Faulkner began textile manufacturing on the east bank in 1811, and Charles P. Talbot came to the west bank in 1839, making dyewoods and then chemicals (1849) and building the woolen mill of 1857. The Boston and Lowell Railroad came through in the 1830s. Most of the village was built between about 1860 and the early twentieth century: mill housing on Wilson Street, Elm Street and Lowell Street from the 1860s, Talbot Avenue, laid out in 1894, with large duplexes designed by Stickney and Austin of Lowell in 1899 to 1902, and the landscapes of Warren H. Manning. Thomas Talbot, elected governor of Massachusetts in 1878, gave the land and money for the Baptist church in 1870. The nomination found that the district meets National Register criteria A, B and C at the state level.

Its main buildings, as the nomination numbers them, include the Talbot Mills (No. 601, 1857 and later), five-story brick with an octagonal belfry; the Faulkner Mills (No. 701, 1865 and later); The Canal Block (No. 649, about 1835), the oldest multi-family block, taken down in 1984; the Mears Tavern and the Captain Joel Dix House on Elm Street (1815); the Greek Revival Daniel Wilson House (1848), built for "Boss" Wilson; the North Billerica Baptist Church (1869 to 1870), designed by Alexander R. Esty; the Faulkner Kindergarten (the James R. Faulkner house of 1826, a kindergarten from 1897) and the James R. Faulkner House of 1859; the Oliver Farmer II House (1803), one of Billerica's three brick-enders; the William Rogers House (1807) on Rogers Street; the Fairbrother-Brown House on Wilson Street; the Kohlrausch House (1886) on Colson Street; Father Matthew Hall (1886) on Lowell Street; the Talbot School (1902); Saint Andrew's Roman Catholic Church and its rectory on Talbot Avenue, the last major institutional buildings; and the railroad buildings at the Carleton and Ruggles Street end, the North Billerica Railroad Depot and the Depot Warehouse. Manning's Talbot Mills Oval (1903) and the Kohlrausch playground of 1913, now Kohlrausch Park, are part of the district. Much of the Talbot mill housing is described with the Talbot Mills Housing neighborhood.

Billerica Mills Historic District

Billerica Mills Historic District

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