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HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF MEDFORD, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, FROM ITS FIRST SETTLEMENT, IN 1630, TO THE PRESENT TIME, 1855. (ed. Charles Brooks), Chapter 1: (search)
undantly. Around its trunk the woodpeckers had drilled as many as five or six circles of holes, not larger than a pea; and, from this most visible peculiarity, the apples were called Woodpecker apples. By degrees their name was shortened to Peckers; and, during my youth, they were seldom called by any other name. How they came by their present appellative is this. Young Baldwin, of Woburn, afterwards a colonel, and father of Loami, was an intimate friend of young Thompson (afterwards Count Rumford); and, as lovers of science, they asked permission of Professor Winthrop to attend his course of lectures in natural philosophy, at Harvard College. Twice each week, these two thirsty and ambitious students walked from their homes in Woburn to bring back with them from Cambridge the teachings of the learned professor. One day, as they were passing by the Woodpecker tree, they stopped to contemplate the tempting red cheeks on those loaded boughs; and the result of such contemplations wa