Eagle Feathers #253 – Menotomy

By Bob (Monty) Doherty

Until 1842, Charlestown Beyond the Neck, as Somerville was then called, consisted of present-day Somerville and a northwest extended area called Charlestown End. This area that stretched beyond Alewife Brook Parkway included part of today’s East Arlington and its Morningside section.

Arlington was first settled around 1635 as part of Cambridge and embraced the Indian name, Menotomy. This moniker was after the river with that name, which today is the Alewife Brook. In 1807, the area was incorporated as West Cambridge. In 1850, pruning of its territory helped shape Winchester and in 1859, helped mold Belmont. On April 30, 1867, the name of Arlington was chosen in honor and remembrance of those Civil War heroes buried in Arlington National Cemetery. This town’s historic and celebrated chronicle doesn’t end there.

• In 1639, Pawtucket’s Queen Squaw Sachem deeded the land including Menotomy to colonists.

• Early in the morning of April 19, 1775, Paul Revere’s famous ride took him to Lexington through Menotomy Village.

• The bloodiest part of the battle of Lexington and Concord was fought in Menotomy between what is now Arlington Heights and Arlington Center. Forty-nine Patriots and 65 British were lost on the first day of the American Revolution. Twenty-five Patriots, and 40 British were lost in Menotomy alone.
• An Arlington Center memorial states, “Near this spot Samuel Whittemore then 80 years old. Killed three British soldiers April 19, 1775. He was shot, bayoneted, beaten and left for dead but recovered and lived to be 98 years of age.”

• Samuel Wilson, the national personification of the United States, U.S. and Uncle Sam, was born in historic Menotomy/Arlington near today’s Minuteman Bikeway. Arlington’s Uncle Sam Memorial Statue marks his birthplace.

• The Jason Russell House is a Menotomy-era historic site. It is a museum which honors Russell and the eleven patriots who died fighting in his house on April 19, 1775.

• Cyrus Dallin, nationally acclaimed Native American sculptor, spent his adult life in Arlington. Locally, he is most famous for his statue of Paul Revere located in Boston’s North End. He is also known for his Native American statue, The Appeal to the Great Spirit, that stands in front of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and The Menotomy Indian Hunter, located in the attractive garden between Arlington’s Robbins Memorial Town Hall and the Robbins Library.

At one time, Menotomy was the original name of Arlington, of today’s Alewife Brook, of Broadway, of the Somerville/Arlington border crossing bridge and of Spy Pond. It was an American Native name, an Algonquin word meaning Swift Running Water. The town’s many ponds and brooks which once fed and flowed into the now Alewife Brook have been filled in through the years, reducing these great streams to today’s trickle.