Medford Historical Society Papers, Volume 15.

[p. 53] of open construction, and each corner was of pine timber four by six inches in size. Their pagoda roofs were of heavy sheet iron, terminating in iron finials, in which were the letters E. B. in monogram. It would have been well if Principal Hobbs' idea of placing it in the corridor of the new Brooks school could have materialized.

Historian Brooks said the locality was ‘where pure air comes from the heavens, and pure water from the earth’—and hereby hangs a tale, told the writer in 1866 by an elderly Medford man. He dug a well in the dry summer time into a hillside's underlying ledge; a slow, laborious process, and all the broken rock had to be hoisted out in buckets by a windlass. He had excavated below all other wells, and no water was reached. Resuming his work one day he noticed a moist and seamy place in the rock, and struck it with the sharp point of his crowbar. A chip of stone fell off, and a stream of water flowed in. His helper shouted, ‘The tub! the tub!’ and before they were hoisted out by the men on the surface the water was up to their necks. The writer had not heard of the Brooks schoolhouse then, but very likely this is the place.

Reference has been made to the excess of expense above the town's appropriation. In the immediately preceding years several new houses had been erected in the ‘West End,’ notably those of Revs. John Pierpont and David Greene Haskins, the two Hastings, and two by D. N. Skillings. Beside these were the Wood, Breed and Spaulding residences beyond the railway. These were all large, well-built houses, which shame some of more modern construction. Too large for present-day use by one family, they do not lend themselves well to the recent craze for ‘two-flat houses.’ These and the less pretentious ones of that period can readily be identified by careful observers. With these came the call for increased school accommodation and for a meeting-place or social center. So for this latter was the subscription list and funds the historian and committee mention, and