Where to Stay in Medford, Massachusetts

What is Medford known for?

Its campus runs across the line between Medford and Somerville, which gives this Middlesex County city a student calendar and a rhythm that the ordinary residential suburbs of Massachusetts around it do not share. Old houses fill the rest. The Isaac Royall House, the Peter Tufts House and the Cooper-Frost-Austin House carry the colonial centuries forward, while the Cyrus E. Dallin Art Museum gives the city a collection under its own name.

What are the main landmarks in Medford?

Medford counts its landmarks in churches. Grace Episcopal Church, St. James Episcopal Church, the First Unitarian Church, the First Universalist Church, Calvary Methodist Church, North Avenue Congregational Church and Broadway Winter Hill Congregational Church give a city of this size an unusually long list of parish buildings. Two museums join them.

The Barnum Museum of Natural History and the Cyrus E. Dallin Art Museum hold the collections, while the Isaac Royall House, the Cooper-Frost-Austin House and the Butterfield-Whittemore House carry the domestic side of the record.

What is the history of Medford?

Medford dates from 1630. That founding is among the earliest anywhere in Middlesex County, and the buildings that survive from the colonial period, the Peter Tufts House and the Cooper-Frost-Austin House and the Isaac Royall House among them, are the physical record of it. Ministers left names on doors.

The Reverend David Osgood House and the Unitarian Universalist Church of Medford and the Osgood House both carry a clergyman's name forward into the modern street directory of Massachusetts. The nineteenth century built most of the rest. Houses raised for named households, the Adams-Magoun House, the Butterfield-Whittemore House, the Charles H. Bradshaw House, the J. Fred Berry House, the Judge William Ellison Parmenter House and the Stillman F. Kelley House, mark the decades in which Medford filled with families whose work lay elsewhere.

Churches followed the same curve. Calvary Methodist Church, the First Universalist Church and North Avenue Congregational Church went up as separate congregations in a place that had begun with a single meetinghouse, and the addresses recorded as the House at 5-7 Winter Street and the House at 25 Clyde Street survive from the same building years. Tufts University then changed the balance again.

Its campus drew a student body across the boundary Medford shares with Somerville, and fixed the city's later character as a college town rather than a farming one.

Where is Medford?

Medford's edges never sit far from its centre. Its ground covers roughly twenty-two square kilometres of Middlesex County, enough to carry a university campus and a long run of residential streets without any part of it lying far from the others. Somerville adjoins it directly.

The Tufts University campus crosses that shared boundary, which makes the line between the two Massachusetts cities a matter of paperwork rather than of anything a walker would notice underfoot.

What is the climate of Medford?

Winter runs long in Medford. The city lies in the temperate band of the northern hemisphere, so the year turns through deep cold, a late and grudging spring, a humid high summer, and an autumn that strips the trees along the older residential streets. Snow is a working assumption.

Anyone booking a Medford room between December and March should plan around it, and anyone arriving in July should expect the heavy air that settles over this part of Massachusetts for weeks together.

How do you get to Medford?

Nothing lands in Medford itself. The city has no airport and no long-distance terminal, so every traveller arrives overland from elsewhere in Middlesex County, and the boundary shared with Somerville is the crossing most of them use. After that it is walking.

Medford covers little enough ground that the Isaac Royall House, the Cyrus E. Dallin Art Museum and the Tufts University campus all sit within a modest radius of one another.