Medford Historical Society Papers, Volume 4.

[p. 88] was given to this street which seemed exactly fitting; for at a town meeting held May 4, 1829, a committee that had been appointed to recommend names for the streets reported as follows: ‘From Porter's corner southeast to Wellington farm, Ship Street.’ Unfortunately after fifty years the name ‘Ship street’ was laid aside on petition of the last ship-builder of the Ship-street yards. Perhaps it seemed to him an appropriate thing to do, as ship-building was then in its decline in Medford, and it happened that he built the last ship. On Nov. 15, 1872, it was voted at town meeting that the name of Ship street be changed to Riverside Avenue, on petition of J. T. Foster and others.

The oldest residents on Riverside avenue and many others born and brought up on the old street still cling to the familiar name ‘Ship street.’ A quotation from the Boston Transcript of several years ago may not be out of place here.

Speaking of the way in which the ship-building industry of Medford has disappeared and left hardly a trace of the once familiar ship-yards along the meadow, the writer says: ‘Even the name of the street which commemorated the industry— “Ship street,” which runs along the edge of this meadow—has been changed, with a totally Philistine indifference to the fitness of things, to “Riverside avenue.” Perhaps, with the progress of popular cultivation and the coming of a better sense of what is fit and proper, the name of Ship street may be restored to the quiet old thoroughfare which leads out past the Cradock House; and then the town will possess at least one reminder of its noblest industry.’

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Some of its houses and characters.

The men who came to Medford to engage in the ship-building industry and settled along Ship street built plain, substantial houses of ample proportion varying but little in style from one another. The square