Medford: A Brief History

By Dee Morris

Since its early days in the possession of a man who never set foot on the land itself, Medford has been a place of possibility. Many Medford residents have made their mark on American culture, including James W. Tufts, the inventor of the soda fountain, and Fannie Farmer, author of the first modern cookbook. Medford has been the site of revolutionary changes, as entrepreneur Thatcher Magoun built the wildly successful clipper ship industry, and in the case of Belinda Royall, a slave who remarkably won her legal emancipation in 1773. Author Dee Morris renders a richly detailed history, from the Medford Square rum distilleries that sent a molasses smell wafting through town for centuries to the celebration for Amelia Earhart, who lived in West Medford briefly, before her first successful transatlantic flight. Medford: A Brief History reveals hidden stories behind a small town with a big legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Nov 2, 2009
• ISBN: 9781625843173

Dee Morris

Dee Morris is an independent scholar and educational consultant specializing in the nineteenth-century history of Greater Boston. She presents walking tours at Forest Hills Cemetery (Jamaica Plain) and programs at libraries, schools and historical societies. Her goal is to connect people with their civic ancestors.

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INTRODUCTION

Poor people do not seem so poor here, nor the rich so rich as elsewhere.

—a vacationer in Medford, Massachusetts Ploughman, 1848

Medford is more than a city of about eight square miles located north of Boston. It is several neighborhoods of variable terrain connected by the Mystic River. In fact, Medford is a great deal like the river flowing through its heart. It moves forward to embrace the future while it steps back to safeguard the past. The ebb and flow of the Mystic in former days provided sustenance for the Native Americans and was one of the main reasons why industrious and creative settlers moved here.

I began to understand this fluid yet consistent city when, several years ago, Barbara Kerr of the Medford Public Library asked me to put together a walking tour of Medford Square. That was a success, so it seemed obvious to explore other sections or even subsections of a few streets. The neighborhoods were different yet the focal points remained the same: Who lived there? What happened in that place? How has it changed? The answers have been informative and positively enlightening. In Victorian times, from the 1830s through the 1890s, Medford was composed of several villages. They were Medford Square, West Medford and Medford Hillside. Toward the east lay Glenwood, centered at Park Street, and Wellington, a farming district next to Malden. South Medford was never given a local name. Abutting Somerville’s Winter Hill, it was the location of two famous racetracks. After they closed, an energetic community of Italian families settled in the Harvard Street area. Except to those of us who live there, north Medford or Fulton Heights remains a mystery because of convoluted street patterns. The Mystic River was so important that it had to have its own chapter.

People of different social and economic levels created a community. The famous and the rich were often well documented, yet they needed to become three dimensional. Those in the vast ocean of the middle class were often portrayed as history’s cast of extras, essential but not memorable. To level the playing field and get a sense of the fabric of a neighborhood, I examined the Medford Mercury, the Boston Globe and the writings of local authors in the Medford Historical Register. The Registry of Deeds in Cambridge provided fresh information as to how people used the land, especially in the nineteenth century. I singled out a few people, extraordinary in different ways, who could be viewed as unique entrepreneurs or original thinkers.

Medford’s formal history began when a vast number of acres were granted to Mr. Cradock to be his own peculiar plantation in the 1630s. By adding tracts from Charlestown and Malden and then giving away some land to Winchester and Everett, this place became an official city in 1892. Like the Mystic River, it has experienced development, multiple use, preservation and reconfiguration. A wide range of people have called Medford their home. Here are some of their stories.

CHAPTER 1

LOCATING PLACE

A Peculiar Plantation

It is paradise…For here are many isles planted with corn, groves, mulberries, savage gardens, and good harbors. The seacoast, as you pass, shows you all along large cornfields.

—Captain John Smith, 1614

The river was called the Missi-tuk or great tidal river because the current flowed at first in one direction and then in the opposite. It found its source in the Mystic Lake, a freshwater body divided into roughly equal parts by the Partings, a shoal where the land rose slightly. From there, the winding river curved and turned until it met the ocean. The tides were gentle, varying the depth within its channel. It was a watery highway free from sunken rocks or sandbars. Although the banks were often steep, some natural landing places permitted access to the stream. An occasional ford made crossing from one side to the other possible by foot. Native Americans drew bass and blue fin from the river and placed seines in the brooks that teemed with alewives so numerous that they created a silvery carpet in season. When water drained from the riverside every twelve hours, the exposed areas released an invigorating and salty breath. The Mystic River was a sacred gift protected by the people.

Land was also varied. Much was a thick wilderness penetrated only by trails worn by generations of native tribes. Craggy prominences in the north were laced with fresh springs that rose from fissures in the rocks. Less dramatic and more undulating hills framed portions of the west and east. Upland meadows descended down to a level plain that encompassed the south. Bordering the river, wide salt marshes became meadows perfect for raising corn, pumpkins and other crops because the soil was being constantly renewed. Besides hunting for deer in the dense forests of oak, maple and cedar, natives trapped beavers, muskrats and mink, some of the animals that provided rich pelts. Supple birch bark was harvested for canoes, while several varieties of pine supplied timber for lodge supports. The Pawtucket tribe understood the natural cycles, yet even these hunter/gatherers modified the environment by thinning out animal species, leaving behind their cast offs and debris and through the annual burning of underbrush to gain open space for village use.

Marshall Symmes’s great-grandfather saw twenty-seven lodges on the shores of the Mystic Lake in the 1600s. Even then, the Native American population was in steady decline. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

A series of events first altered and then obliterated their lifestyle. In 1617 a plague ravaged the population of several thousand, greatly reducing numbers. There were so many deaths that bodies were piled in heaps as the living fled in an attempt to save themselves. Adding to their misfortunes was intertribal warfare with the aggressive Tarrantines from farther north (1619). Making a last stand at his palisade and fortified lodge at Rock Hill, Nanepashemet, the Pawtucket chief, was murdered. Charles Brooks, the Medford historian, referenced an eyewitness account of the desolation in 1621:

Having gone three miles, we came to the place where corn had been newly gathered, a house pulled down, and the people gone. A mile from hence Nanepashemet…had lived. His house was not like the others; but a scaffold was largely built with poles and planks, some six feet from the ground…Here [the chief] was killed, none dwelling on it since the time of his death.

Squa Sachem, his widow, gathered the remnants of her tribe at the shores of the Mystic Lake. After the initial wave of Europeans arrived (1628–30), she befriended the newcomers in the hopes of creating allies. Sagamore John, one of her three sons, sought out the settlers near the Mystic River. He was described as being courteous, open and fond of English apparel, to the extent that he often spoke of moving in with the colonists. In 1633, as he lay dying, a victim of another smallpox epidemic, Sagamore John asked that his child be cared for by Mr. Wilson, a minister sympathetic to his plight. Deprived of her son’s support, Squa Sachem deeded much of her remaining land to the English (1639) but reserved some lakeside territory for her own use.

In 1862 several adult Native American skeletons were uncovered during construction at the Brooks estate. At least one was donated to the anthropology museum at Harvard. Years later, in 1884, when Lucien Conant, foreman of the same property, was excavating a cellar hole, he unearthed a few artifacts and some skeletons that had been buried in a sitting position. Francis Brooks erected over the spot a memorial shaft surmounted by a natural boulder. The inscription read in part: To Sagamore John and those Mystic Indians whose bones lie here.

MATTHEW CRADOCK: AN ASTUTE BUSINESSMAN

Already experienced in an East Indies enterprise (1628), Matthew Cradock was eager to join colleagues Winthrop, Dudley and Saltonstall in a new opportunity called the Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England. The goal was trade, and settlement became the means to do it. Cradock organized a company of skilled workmen, shipbuilders and carpenters to act as his agents across the ocean. The king approved a charter and appointed the influential Cradock as governor, another term for president. After an initial exploratory group, four well-equipped ships sailed forth with two belonging to Cradock, thus making him a prime investor. His financial stake was acknowledged by a sovereign grant of two thousand acres. At this time, Europeans assumed that Native Americans had no legal title to where they lived. Ownership was also based on the perception that English explorers had discovered new territory and could, therefore, claim it.

Peter Tufts Sr. (1617–1700) constructed this house on Riverside Avenue from locally made bricks circa 1677. Showing neglect in this 1884 image, it was then purchased and remodeled by General Lawrence as a wedding gift for his niece. Courtesy of the Medford Public Library.

The land that ultimately became Medford was based on a peculiar (one ownership) plantation of Governor Cradock, surrounded by some parcels belonging to Charlestown. By 1629 his men had established a presence by setting down plantings on the north bank of the Mystic at the urging of John Winthrop, who staked out the south side. The Cradock farm was a recognizable landmark by 1630. Within a few years (1635), the General Court described the grant to which Cradock was entitled. On the east it abutted the property of Nowell and Wilson (Malden), while going west it extended to the Mystic Lake. The Mystic River defined the south, and the north went as far as the Middlesex Fells. Although he maintained long-distance contact, Cradock never stepped foot on his remarkable business venture. In 1630 he was able to transfer governance of the colony from the English Crown to the settlement, an act that would have far-reaching consequences. It was the unstoppable shift from a trading co-partnership to the beginnings of a political commonwealth. Medford was never officially declared by the General Court to be a town, however, by the 1690s it was functioning with all the rights and privileges of one.

Besides wanting a good financial return on his investment, Cradock, as quoted in Brooks, expected his people to live unblamable and without reproof, and demean themselves justly and courteously toward the Indians. Upon the Governor’s death about 1641 and after his English relatives were reimbursed, Edward Collins, his prime agent, enthusiastically bought up large tracts and then sold them. By the end of the 1690s families such as the Wades, Tufts, Brooks and Bishops were important proprietors. Charles Brooks never tired of declaring that Medford had a wonderful founding father.

THE ROYALL HOUSE: A JEWEL ON MAIN STREET

Cradock’s colleague, John Winthrop, received from the Crown in 1637 a grant called Ten Hills Farm that embraced a good part of Charlestown (now Somerville). He conveyed a large section of his property south of the Mystic River to Mrs. Elizabeth Lidgett (1677). The deal included the farmhouse, which was a very simple saltbox structure with a chimney at either end. By the 1690s John Usher, her son-in-law, expanded the house’s footprint. Moving forward to the 1730s, Elizabeth Usher sold the renovated house and several hundred acres to Isaac