Thomas Talbot

Born	1818-09-07 Cambridge, NY
Died	1885-10-06 Billerica, MA
Representative to the General Court
In Office	1851 - 1851
Succeeded by	Henry Rice
Howe School Trustee
In Office	1866 - 1885
Preceded by	Marshall Preston
Succeeded by	Wallace G. Webber

Thomas Talbot was born in Cambridge, New York, on September 7, 1818, the son of Charles Talbot and Phebe White, who had married in Ireland in 1802 and soon emigrated. His father, a woolen manufacturer, moved the family to Danby, Vermont, and died there in 1823. His mother, whom Hazen calls "a woman of character and energy," then took her large family to the woolen mills of Massachusetts, while making sure the children went to school; Thomas had two winter terms at Cummington Academy. He worked in the mills at Williamsburg and in 1839 was finishing broadcloth at the Pontoosuc Mills in Pittsfield when his brother Charles P. Talbot, who had come to Billerica that December, invited him to join him.

As C. P. Talbot & Co., the brothers built the industry of North Billerica. They began grinding dyewoods in a building rented from the Middlesex Canal company, bought the Stearns sawmill in 1844, started chemical works in 1849 that produced oil of vitriol, blue vitriol and muriatic acid, acquired the canal company's water rights on the Concord River, and in 1857 built their woolen mill, the Talbot Mills, which by 1883 employed two hundred hands. Talbot gave North Billerica its Baptist meeting-house, dedicated on January 19, 1871, and in 1880 the brothers opened a library and reading room for their workers in a wing of the factory. He was a trustee of the Howe School, presided at the dedication of the Soldiers' Monument on October 8, 1873, and sat on the committee appointed in 1869 to prepare the town's history. He married Mary Howe Rogers of Billerica in 1848; after her death in 1851 he married Isabella W. Hayden of Williamsburg, and they had several children.

Billerica sent him to the legislature as its representative in 1851, and he sat in the convention chosen to revise the state constitution. He was on the Governor's Council from 1864 to 1869, was elected Lieutenant Governor in 1872 and 1873, and became acting Governor in 1874 when Governor Washburn went to the United States Senate. A lifelong temperance man, he vetoed the bill to replace prohibition with a license law, and, against the wishes of his fellow manufacturers, he signed the ten-hour law for workers. He lost the 1874 election narrowly, declined to run in 1875, and was elected Governor in 1878, serving through 1879 before declining another term. He was also president of the Boston and Lowell Railroad and a trustee of the Clarke Institution for Deaf Mutes. Hazen wrote that he "has never been an office-seeker, but office and honor have sought him as a man who could be trusted."

Governor Talbot died at his North Billerica home on October 6, 1885, and was buried in the Lowell Cemetery. North Billerica's Masonic lodge, chartered in 1889, took the name Thomas Talbot Lodge, and his family built the Thomas Talbot Memorial Hall in the village in the early 1890s. The village schoolhouse, built in 1885 and 1886 on land from his estate, was the Talbot School, and when the town replaced it in 1902 with a brick building on Talbot Avenue, on land bought from the Talbot Mills, the new school kept the name.

Thomas Talbot

Thomas Talbot

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