Medford Historical Society Papers, Volume 8.

[p. 85] contained the original town clock presented by Mr. Brooks, while higher up was the bell cast by Paul Revere. At this time it will lack the ornamental finish given later by the Toughs (college boys), that of a black stovepipe hat securely fastened on the three-pronged lightning rod that surmounted the top story of the steeple. Below the meeting-house the terraced gardens of the Bigelow estate sloped away from High street to the mouth of Meetinghouse Brook, while scattered along the road were the old-fashioned houses, some now demolished, among them that of Parson Turell, others remodeled and still remaining.

As the train moved along the view of these was quickly broken by the seamed and scarred promontory of Rock Hill, where once was the home of Nanepashemit, and which commanded a view of the river in either direction. No bridge spanned the river at Auburn street as now, but the disused canal, innocent of water, was plainly visible before reaching the loop in the river near the mouth of Whitmore Brook, where once a ship was built and launched. Scattered here and there on the gentle slope from High street to the river, and on the steeper side of Mystic Hill were some fifty dwellings in 1870, among which the Brooks schoolhouse stood sharply out as a central figure. These formed the bulk of the West End—the West Medford of 1870.

To the left of the high embankment in which is the railway arch across the Mystic, was a stretch of marsh crossed by the embankments of the old canal, and beyond these, the tall, graceful chimney of the pumping station of the Charlestown Water Works, then just completed, but now disused. Just here Menotomy River (now degenerated into Alewife Brook), finishes its sluggish course from Fresh Pond in Cambridge to the Mystic, and here it was that Governor Winthrop once spent an October night alone (in 1631), an uninvited guest in the vacant dwelling of Sagamore John. Still looking out from the car window to the left, we would see the