Medford is a city 6.7 miles (10.8 km) northwest of downtown Boston on the Mystic River in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. At the grow old of the 2020 U.S. Census, Medford’s population was 59,659. It is house to Tufts University, which has its campus along the Medford and Somerville border.

Native Americans inhabited the area that would become Medford for thousands of years prior to European colonization of the Americas. At the period of European get into and exploration, Medford was the winter home of the Naumkeag people, who farmed corn and created fishing weirs at multipart sites along the Mystic River. Naumkeag sachem Nanepashemet was killed and buried at his fortification in present-day Medford during a deed with the Tarrantines in 1619. The admission period introduced a number of European infectious diseases which would decimate indigenous populations in virgin soil epidemics, including a smallpox epidemic which in 1633 which killed Nanepashemet’s sons, sachems Montowompate and Wonohaquaham. Sagamore Park in West Medford is a original burial site from the admittance period which includes the remains of a likely sachem, either Nanepashemet or Wonohaquaham. After the 1633 epidemic, Nanepashemet’s widow, known by yourself as the Squaw Sachem of Mistick, led the Naumkeag, and exceeding the next two decades would ability large parts of Naumkeag territory to English settlers. In 1639, the Massachusetts General Court purchased the estate that would become present day Medford, then within the boundaries of Charlestown, from the Squaw Sachem.

Medford was granted in 1630 by English colonists as allowance of Charlestown, of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The treaty was originally called “Mistick” by Thomas Dudley, based upon the original name for the area’s river. Thomas Dudley’s party renamed the settlement “Meadford”. The publicize may have come from a relation of the “meadow by the ford” in the Mystic River, or from two locations in England that Cradock may have known: the hamlet of Mayford or Metford in Staffordshire near Caverswall, or from the parish of Maidford or Medford (now Towcester, Northamptonshire). In 1634, the land north of the Mystic River was developed as the private plantation of Matthew Cradock, a former governor. Across the river was Ten Hills Farm, which belonged to John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony.

In 1637, the first bridge (a toll bridge) across the Mystic River was built at the site of the present-day Cradock Bridge, which carries Main Street into Medford Square. It would be the solitary bridge across the Mystic until 1787, and as such became a major route for traffic coming into Boston from the north (though ferries and fords were next used). The bridge would be rebuilt in 1880, 1909, and 2018.