Medford Historical Society Papers, Volume 22.

It was doubtless the old home of the pious deacon John Whitmore on which the later residence of James M. Usher was built. Across the street was the old Bucknam house, in recent years removed, making room for the West Medford post-office, and the cottage of Captain Wyatt, which still remains as a reminder of those early days. The great Whitmore elm was then in its prime, and for sixty years thereafter. Whitmore brook flowed through the Warren farm, but had not then acquired its modern habit of taking a summer vacation. Some rods to the west was the Middlesex canal, but no railroad was dreamed of when this boy came to his grandfather's to live.

He described his grandparents as very pious, and kind and affectionate to him, his grandmother especially so. Because of old associations they worshipped in the old meeting-house at Menotomy, but when his mother (and sister) came to Medford and lived in the old Bucknam house, she was taken into the Medford church and all her children baptized by Dr. Osgood who was a friend and contemporary of her grandfather, Dr. Cummings of Billerica. Thereafter William's Sunday school days were divided between Menotomy and Medford, where such an institution was then something new. Miss Lucy Osgood directed it and Miss Elizabeth Brooks was his teacher. Another innovation in William Warren's boyhood was the first stove in the Medford meeting-house in the winter of 1820. As his mother did not come till two years later, chances are that he went to Menotomy with grandsire Warren, and so did not witness the novel installation, and just here we are led to make some mental comparisons of that time, less than a century ago, with the present fuel conservation that would close our churches, and the “cold and shivering air,” we assume in a winter no more rigorous than in those times.