Medford is a city 6.7 miles (10.8 km) northwest of downtown Boston on the Mystic River in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States.

Native Americans inhabited the area that would become Medford for thousands of years prior to European colonization of the Americas.

At the time of European contact and exploration, Medford was the winter home of the Naumkeag people, who farmed corn and created fishing weirs at multiple sites along the Mystic River.

[3] Naumkeag sachem Nanepashemet was killed and buried at his fortification in present-day Medford during a war with the Tarrantines in 1619.

Sagamore Park in West Medford is a native burial site from the contact period, which includes the remains of a likely sachem, either Nanepashemet or Wonohaquaham.

In 1639, the Massachusetts General Court purchased the land that would become present-day Medford, then within the boundaries of Charlestown, from the Squaw Sachem.

[6] The name may have come from a description 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).

Across the river was Ten Hills Farm, which belonged to John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony.

One of his grandsons was John Hancock, who was a later notable figure of the American Revolutionary War and later elected as first and third governor of Massachusetts.

Medford was incorporated as a city in 1892, and was a center of industry, including the manufacture of tiles and crackers,[16] bricks,[17] rum,[18] and clipper ships,[19] such as the White Swallow and the Kingfisher, both built by Hayden & Cudworth.

[21] The Medford Turnpike Company was incorporated in 1803 and (as was reasonably common at the time) turned what is now Mystic Avenue over to the city in 1866.

The Andover Turnpike Company was incorporated in 1805 and turned what is now Forest Street and Fellsway West over to Medford in 1830.

The street railway network expanded in the hands of various private companies and went electric in the late 1890s when trolleys to Everett and downtown Boston were available.

[26][27] Another resident, Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880), made a poem out of the trip across town to her grandparents' house, now the song "Over the River and Through the Wood".

Another important site is the "Slave Wall" on Grove Street, built by "Pomp",[28] an enslaved person owned by the prominent Brooks family.

The house was used by Continental Army troops, including George Washington and John Stark, during the American Revolutionary War.

His passion for the abolitionist cause shaped his life, bringing him into contact with the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson and starting The Nation magazine.

Elizabeth Short, the victim of an infamous Hollywood murder and who became known as The Black Dahlia, was born in Hyde Park (the southernmost neighborhood of the city of Boston, Massachusetts) but raised in Medford before going to the West Coast looking for fame.

Former Red Sox pitcher Bill Monbouquette grew up in Medford, as did former Major League Baseball infielder Mike Pagliarulo.

The only cryobank of amniotic stem cells in the United States is located in Medford, built by Biocell Center, a biotechnology company led by Giuseppe Simoni.

West Medford, the most affluent of Medford's many neighborhoods, was once the bastion of some of Boston's elite families—including Peter Chardon Brooks, one of the wealthiest men in post-colonial America and father-in-law to Charles Francis Adams—and is also home to a historic African-American neighborhood that dates to the Civil War.