Two Brothers Rocks-Dudley Road Historic District

Dudley Road winds along the Concord River where Bedford and Billerica meet, about seventeen miles northwest of Boston. The 230-acre district centers on this scenic road, lined with stone walls, wooded lots and farm fields. Its buildings range from the Capt. John Stearns House of about 1689 to a variety of Federal, Greek Revival and Colonial Revival homes. Among them is the brick Abner Stearns-Edward Pickman House of about 1796-1805. Roughly 40 percent of the land is public open space, including part of a national wildlife refuge that holds Two Brothers Rocks and the Stearns Mill Site. The area also reflects the Pickman family's early 20th-century estate. Staff, many of them immigrants, lived in nearby houses and worked two farms, and a pump house supplied water before municipal service arrived in the 1930s. A dairy farm converted to religious use in the 1920s adds a further layer. Together these resources show continuity from colonial settlement through the mid-20th century.