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

[13] physical herbs. Here are plenty of single damask roses, very sweet; also, mulberries, plums, raspberries, currants, chessnuts, filberds, walnuts, smallnuts, hurtleberries, and hawes of white-thorne, near as good as cherries in England. They grow in plenty here.

The fullest credit may be given to these statements of Mr. Higginson. They show, among other things, that the region we now occupy was a dense forest in 1629. This confirms the story told of Gov. Winthrop; that when he took up his residence on his farm at “Ten Hills,” on the bank of Mystic River, he one day penetrated the forest near “Winter Hill.” He so lost his latitude and longitude as to become entirely bewildered. Night came on, and he knew not which way to steer. After many ineffectual trials to descry any familiar place, he resigned himself to his fate, kindled a fire, put philosophy in his pocket, and bivouacked, feeling much as St. Paul did in his shipwreck-voyage, when they “cast anchor, and wished for day.” What the Governor learned or dreamed of during that rural night we are not specifically told; but his absence created a sharp alarm among his family, and a hunting party started in quest of him. They “shot off pieces and hallooed in the night; but he heard them not.” He found his way home in the morning, and discovered that he had been near his house most of the time.

It would be hard, in our day, to find a forest within sight of the “Ten-Hill farm” in which a boy of ten years old could be lost for a moment. The almost entire destruction of our forests within twenty miles of Boston, and our inexplicable neglect in planting new ones, argues ill, not only for our providence and economy, but for our patriotism and taste. Plant a hogshead of acorns in yonder rockland, and your money will return you generous dividends from nature's savings' bank.

In 1629, Mr. Graves, of Charlestown, said in a letter sent to England: “Thus much I can affirm in general, that I never came in a more goodly country in all my life. If it hath not at any time been manured and husbanded, yet it is very beautiful in open lands, mixed with goodly woods, and again open plains, in some places five hundred acres, some places more, some less, not much troublesome for to clear for the plough to go in; no place barren, but on the tops of hills.”