HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF MEDFORD, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, FROM ITS FIRST SETTLEMENT, IN 1630, TO THE PRESENT TIME, 1855.
Charles Brooks, Ed.

We are sure this is but a rough sketch of the manners and life of the early settlers in Medford; but we hope it may suffice to show those salient traits of industry and economy, of truthfulness and devotion, for which they were so clearly distinguished. We must look through their eyes to see them aright. They were content if they could gain a comfortable subsistence, and have the opportunity of worshipping God according to the dictates of their own consciences. Their condition, their dwellings, their dress, their facilities, their relationships,--how different from ours! Deputy-Governor Dudley, March 12, 1631, writes thus: “Having yet no table, nor other room to write in than by the fireside, upon my knee, in this sharp winter, &c.” If the deputy-governor had no more accommodations than these, what must have been the deprivations of the rest of the people? For many of our modern superfluities they had no names in their vocabulary. So late as our day, we have seen aged persons who have assured us that they never tasted tea or coffee until they were over twenty-one years of age. In 1666, tea, in England, was sixty shillings sterling a pound, and was not used much in America till 1750. It was nearly the same with coffee. Any cooking which required sugar was too expensive for our early ancestors; and the Sunday suit of clothes went through a whole life. For vocal music, they had the volunteer solo from the cradle; for instrumental, they had the sputter of the churn, the scraping of the wool-cards, the whiz of the spinning-wheel, and the jerk-rattle of the weaving-loom. Their sofa was the “settle,” and their spring-seat was the soft side of an oaken plank; their carpets were clean white sand; their ceilings, rough boards and rafters; and their parlor was at once kitchen, bedroom, and hall. We have seen what their clothing was; and it was the product of their own looms and knitting-needles. The men were not encumbered with suspenders, or dickies, or umbrellas; nor were the women sighing after diamonds, operaglasses, or Cologne water. How expensive, vexatious, and useless would have been long female dresses bedraggled every moment in the grass! Fashion, which is the labor of little minds, and not the repose of great ones, had not become the fickle tyrant we now see it. They aimed at health; and the children who were born weak and feeble could not be kept alive, as they are by modern skill: hence the robustness of those who survived. We come, then, to the conclusion, that moderate labor, simple diet, sufficient sleep, regular habits, and