Ryan W. Owen, Writer and Photographer
In the wake of the New England Hurricane of 1938, Oscar Grenier found work with the W.P.A. cleaning up storm damage near the Farnan Private Hospital for the Aged on North Billerica’s Mt. Pleasant Street. Grenier first noticed the smoke rising from the hospital just after 10 AM on September 30, 1938. He, George Lindsay, […]
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A roll of quarters went a long way at Fun Time Amusements at the Billerica Mall.Despite the mall’s recent renaissance, it’s hard to remember the Billerica Mall of the 1980s and 90s today.
Read MoreAs news of World War I and Spanish flu filled the local papers, the first headlines related to Billerica’s car shop murder almost could have gone unnoticed. In fact, the murder itself went unnoticed for several days. The last anyone had seen of Fred Soulia, an employee at Billerica’s Boston & Maine car shops (today’s […]
Read MoreFamiliar sites greet you as you step from the twenty-minute electric car ride on the Lowell & Suburban into the Billerica Center of 1896. Like today, Town Common dominates the view, its Soldiers’ Monument and flagpole just now disappearing behind the late spring foliage. The Unitarian church and Town Hall (now the Library) bookend today’s […]
Read MoreIn May 1904, ten yards beyond a barbed wire fence in the East Billerica woods, James Marnell stumbled over a small mound of dirt, uncovering an ornate silver serving tray. “Sanborn’s treasure!” Marnell, a railroad worker, excitedly announced. Townspeople knew Sanborn’s treasure to contain silverware, jewelry, and furs stolen the year before from Billerica’s plush […]
Read MoreIf you’ve spent any time in Downtown Lowell, you’ve surely passed Page’s Clock in Kearney Square on Merrimack Street. The clock, refurbished in the 1990’s, has been a Downtown Lowell landmark since the D.L. Page Company moved its operations into the nearby building at 16-18 Merrimack Street in May 1913. As its advertisements claimed, the […]
Read MoreIn those long ago days before cellphones, speed dialing, and stored numbers, folks like Tommy Tutone telephoned girls like ‘Jenny’ by actually dialing 867-5309. If he was a modern type, he may have even punched the number into the telephone’s touchtone keypad, an innovation that was several years old by the time the song was […]
Read MoreMaybe you’ve come through Billerica. On the northern approach, near the North Billerica commuter rail station, lies the site of the John Rogers homestead, marked by a sign erected by the Massachusetts Tercentenary Commission in 1930. The sign memorializes an event that happened even longer ago on today’s Billerica Avenue. Early in Billerica’s history, during the […]
Read MoreWhen I started researching my family tree in 1988, the hobby was quite solitary. I spent hours in the local history room of the Pollard Memorial Library in Lowell, Massachusetts, threading microfilm reels of the local papers through the microfilm readers and leafing through dusty, yellowed City Directories. I remember the excitement of the first time […]
Read MoreTown farms were Victorian society’s equivalent to today’s homeless shelters, nursing homes, and mental hospitals. Often relegated to a far corner of town, unseen, forgotten, and hopefully self-sufficient, the town farm was created to instill a sense of industriousness and self-sufficiency in paupers who would, in turn, provide what labor they could to help run […]
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Forgotten New England 