Medford, Massachusetts
A Short History of Medford
From a riverside plantation worked by enslaved people, to the shipyards that built the fastest vessels on earth, to a streetcar city wrapped around a university.
On the Mystic
Medford grew up along the Mystic River, on land the Pawtucket and Massachusett peoples had fished and farmed for generations. English settlers arrived in 1630 and called the place Meadford. For its first two centuries it was a small farming and trading settlement, close enough to Boston to matter and far enough to keep its own life.
The Royall House and Slavery
Medford holds one of the most important and painful sites in New England. The Royall House and Slave Quarters on George Street was the country estate of Isaac Royall, whose family enslaved more people than any other in Massachusetts. The slave quarters there is the only one still standing in the northern United States, a plain building that forces the region to face a history it often prefers to forget. Money from the Royall family later helped found Harvard Law School. The site is now a museum that tells the story of the people who were enslaved there.
Rum and Bricks
Before the Revolution, Medford was famous for two things you could ship and sell: rum and bricks. Medford rum, distilled from West Indian molasses, was known across the colonies, and the trade tied the town directly to the brutal economy of slavery in the Caribbean. The clay along the river fed brickyards that paved and built much of greater Boston. These industries made Medford prosperous and connected it to a wider, harder world.
Clipper Ships
In 1803 a shipbuilder named Thatcher Magoun opened the first shipyard on the Mystic River in Medford, and the city became one of the great wooden shipbuilding centers in America. Medford yards launched clipper ships that raced to California and China, vessels admired the world over for their speed and their craftsmanship. The maritime historian Samuel Eliot Morison called Magoun’s reputation second to none among American shipbuilders. The shipyards closed as iron and steel replaced wood, but for half a century Medford built the fastest ships afloat.
A University and a Song
In 1852 Tufts College opened on Walnut Hill, straddling the Medford and Somerville line, and grew into Tufts University, today one of the city’s largest employers and a defining presence on its skyline. Medford also lays claim to the most sung Christmas song in the world: a plaque in Medford Square marks the spot where, by local tradition, James Pierpont wrote Jingle Bells around 1850. The claim is disputed by Savannah, Georgia, but Medford has never let it go.
Modern Medford
Medford incorporated as a city in 1892, and the streetcar and the automobile turned its farms and estates into dense neighborhoods. Through the twentieth century it became a working and middle-class home for waves of Irish, Italian, and later Haitian, Brazilian, and Asian immigrants, who together remade the city. Today Medford balances its colonial core, its university, and a downtown square against the pressures of housing costs and a changing climate along the river that made it.
Sources: Medford Historical Society & Museum; Royall House and Slave Quarters; City of Medford; U.S. Census Bureau.