Medford Historical Society Papers, Volume 15.

In improving his estate he erected, in 1820, a granite arch spanning the canal, at a cost of a thousand dollars. Its architect was George Rumford Baldwin, who had just attained his majority, and this was one of his earliest works. The name of the builder is unknown, but it is related that fifty years afterward he came and viewed with pleasure and satisfaction the work of his younger days. The granite composing it was boated from Concord, N. H., down the Merrimac and the canal.

For a little over thirty years its graceful curves were reflected in the placid waters till the canal was abandoned, killed by the rival railroad. Three years later Rev. Charles Brooks wrote of it, hoping it would ‘always remain, a gravestone to mark where the highway of the waters lies buried.’ For fifty-six years it had thus remained, when one day, after an imperilled year of doubtful fate, it was, stone by stone, pulled down. Thus ‘a thing of beauty,’ missed by many, was sacrificed in the extension of Boston avenue along the old canal site.

It has been said that the ‘Real Estate Trust’ was ignorant of its historic associations, and had so far progressed as to make change in its plans impracticable. However this may be, this bridge, the admired subject of frequent remark, the study of architects and artists and well known by its numerous pictures, succumbed to the commercialism of today.

It might have been a valuable asset in an artistic survey of the once beautiful estate, the central object in a park that would have added beauty thereto, whose value need not be estimated in square feet of land and less by cubic feet of stone.

In later years, during some excavation, an Indian burial place was found. The bones of the aborigines thus exhumed were given appropriate sepulture by Mr. Francis Brooks, and a unique monument erected with this inscription, ‘To Sagamore John and those Mystic Indians ’