Medford Historical Society Papers, Volume 25.

[p. 13] 27, 1785. In this marriage triangle of the Barrel, Fitch and Hall families we understand why Joseph Barrel, Jr., became a resident of our town. He married Electa Bingham of Boston, also given as of Stockbridge, the Rev. S. West performing the ceremony July 5, 1795. (Register, Vol. XIX, p. II.)

Hannah Barrel, sister of Joseph, Jr., was married by the Rev. Jedediah Morse of Charlestown, February 8, 1798, to Benjamin Joy, a well-known physician of Boston.

The senior Barrel was a well-known wealthy Boston merchant who had a fine house and an elegant garden on Summer street, when it was a residential section of the city, where there were many fine places. The estate was well laid out, the garden embellished with fish ponds, and when, toward the end of the eighteenth century, he sold this place and moved to Cobble Hill, Charlestown (Somerville was not set apart from Charlestown till 1842), he built for himself a fine brick mansion, a creation of Bulfinch, and duplicated in some ways the garden of the Summer street residence.

The glass in the house is said to have been from the first works erected in Boston. This beautiful place was called Poplar Grove. Benjamin Joy sold the estate in 1816 to the Massachusetts General Hospital for the Mc-Lean Asylum for the Insane. The mansion was used as quarters for the officers of the institution, and additions were built each side of the central portion. All traces of the estate and even the hill no longer exist. For an interesting item concerning the Barrel family, and one concerning Medford, our readers are referred to Francis Hill Bigelow's ‘Historic Silver of the Colonies and Its Makers,’ pp. 302, 303, 363.

After this digression, which we trust is pardonable, believing it to be correlative and not irrelevant to this sketch, we are back in Medford in the old Watson house again and find John Usher of our town preceding Barrell, Jr., as a tenant.

The old meeting-house had seen under its shadow,