Medford Historical Society Papers, Volume 30.

[p. 18] Adams, minister to England in the Civil war, and Charlotte Gray Brooks, later the wife of Edward Everett, orator, governor of Massachusetts, and president of Harvard. A sister of Peter Chardon was Joanna Cotton Brooks, who married Nathaniel Hall of Medford and lived in the home later known as the Samuel C. Lawrence farmhouse. The grandson of this Joanna was Francis Parkman, the historian, and it was doubtless from this house that he tramped through the region of the present Middlesex Fells.

It was left to the grandchildren of Peter C. Brooks, the sons of Gorham,—Peter C. Brooks, third of the name, and Shepherd Brooks to present the aspect of the Brooks property as it is known in Medford in later years.

In 1860, five years after the death of his father, Peter C. Brooks, 3d, built the grey stone house which still stands magnificently at the crest of the hill above Brooks pond, facing on the south the long sweep toward Boston, and on the west the shimmering waters of the Mystic ponds. In 1880 Shepherd Brooks, on the knoll farther to the east, built the brick house with its own splendid outlook. These may be called the sixth and seventh of the Brooks homesteads. It was Shepherd Brooks who transformed the so-called ‘Slow pond,’ which became only a marsh in the dry seasons, into the charming pond that it is today. His workmen cleaned the site, removing the peat of many generations which clogged the living springs, and then built a retaining wall or dike at the western end.

Peter C. Brooks, 3d, and Shepherd Brooks needed no landscape architect to develop the natural beauty of their estates. These landed proprietors loved the land. They were also practical farmers, understanding the raising of vegetables, the rotation of crops, the care of cows, the laying of stone walls and the grading of roadways. Not only did they direct the practical operation of their farms, but with equal success they enhanced the natural beauty of their ample acres by planting gardens