15,000 Years of Gossip: History of Gold Star Road, Part I

By Haakon L. Chevalier, 2026

Introduction

Over forty years ago, I moved to Gold Star Road, a tiny street in North Cambridge off Massachusetts Avenue. For most of that time, I knew almost nothing about its history, and figured it couldn’t be very interesting. How wrong I was! There were so many questions: Who lived here in the past? Why is the land the way it is? Why does Massachusetts Avenue suddenly make a turn at Porter Square?

Two years ago, I decided to give a presentation on the history of the street for our annual block party. I’m not a geologist or archaeologist, but I am an enthusiastic amateur family historian, and it turned out there was too much material for a single talk. In 2025, I gave a prequel, of this area before it was a street, but from a Gold Star-centric point of view, up to the American Revolution, relying a lot on the wonderful Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge, Volume 5, Northwest Cambridge. This paper is a slightly revised version of that talk, and is in two parts: Prehistory and Colonial History. I will be picking up the thread next time at the 19th Century.

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Part One: Prehistory

GLACIER

If we were standing 25,000 years ago where Gold Star Road is now, we would be covered by a humongous sheet of ice, perhaps over a mile thick, the Laurentide, extending from Hudson Bay, Canada. The immense power of the glacier scraped the soil and bedrock beneath it, dumping some at the southern edge of the glacier in big piles called terminal moraines, forming the ridges of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Long Island, which became islands as the melting ice raised the ocean 200 feet.

As the glacier alternately advanced and receded, it also left smaller recessional moraines. One of these recessional moraines, running from Porter Square to the Watertown-Belmont line, geologists call the Fresh Pond Moraine, but locals give each gentle peak a different name: Avon Hill, Observatory Hill, Reservoir Hill, and Strawberry Hill.

Gentle as it is, it forms the divide between the Charles and the Mystic watersheds within the Boston Basin. Other mixed deposits of clay, silt, sand, gravel, and/or boulders, called till, were left behind from below the glacier, and yet others were washed out in layers from under the glacier by meltwater in broad plains called outwashes. Gold Star Road is on an outwash of mostly sand and gravel extending from the Mystic Lakes and Spy Pond beyond Porter Square.¹

The glacial deposits are about 50 feet thick at Porter Square, and about 150 feet thick at Fresh Pond. Fresh Pond is a typical kettle lake formed by a large block of stranded ice which became buried in the deposits. Before the glaciation there were very few lakes.² Spring-fed Fresh Pond discharged north into what is now the Alewife River whose headlands, where the glacier deposited large pockets of blue clay, formed the Great Swamp.

Look for the different glacial deposits in the graphic above:

• Fresh Pond Moraine, in light green
• Sand and gravel of the broad North Cambridge plain in orange along Massachusetts Avenue (a red line)
• Glaciomarine deposits (including clay) near sea level around Fresh Pond and the Charles, in dark blue
• Thin till in light green, in Somerville
• Manufactured artificial fill, in brown
• If you look carefully, you’ll see bedrock outcrops as tiny red dots near Matignon High School

BEDROCK

Below the glacial deposits is a hidden valley 100 feet deep, where before the glaciation a river ran from Wilmington, below the Mystic Lakes, Spy Pond, and Fresh Pond to beneath Lars Anderson Bridge.

Hidden below that is the bedrock, 2 to 4 miles thick, formed roughly 600 million years ago in the late Precambrian, when this land was still part of the ancient continent of Gondwana in the far Southern hemisphere, before a long and complex journey brought it to another ancient continent, Pangea, about 300 million years ago, and finally here to America.³

It is a sedimentary rock, slightly metamorphosed; petrified clay, which used to be called Cambridge slate, now called Cambridge Argillite. It contains fossils found digging the Red Line, but they are microscopic, since that was the only life then.

Cambridge Argillite is the commonest rock in the Boston Basin, more or less the land within Route 128, and outcrops were used by the native Americans for arrowheads and by the colonists for gravestones, slate roofs, and foundations.

Although it is named after Cambridge, it never shows above the surface here. But the rise at the far end of Yorktown Street (as the Somerville end of Gold Star Road is called) is a low ground moraine with thin till, that is, the bedrock is close to the surface. Several outcrops are just over the Somerville border, including a small one which you can see above Malvern Avenue, in the back of the steep vacant lot.⁴

EARLY PEOPLES

Soon after the glaciers retreated 15,000 years ago, the first, Paleolithic, people settled nearby, and probably visited here. They hunted caribou and mastodons, using flaked stone tools.⁵ They disappeared from the area, perhaps due to the warming climate.

About 9,000 years ago in the so-called Archaic Period, about when a few deciduous trees like oaks, elms and maples joined the conifers which had initially settled this region after the ice cleared, another group of people came here.⁶ They used traps called weirs, made of rocks or branches, in the streams and rivers to catch fish, and hunting points from this period have been found in Cambridge.⁷

WOODLAND PEOPLE

Starting about 2,500 years ago, what anthropologists call the Woodland People came to this area. In addition to hunting and gathering of game, freshwater fish, and shellfish, they raised corn, beans, squash, and tobacco from Mesoamerica in permanent winter camps, including one at the junction of the meandering Mystic (River) and Menotomet (Alewife Brook) in present-day Medford.⁸ They cooked in pots made from the local clay.

By the time the colonists arrived, the largest group on the northeastern seaboard were the many Algonquian peoples. Two of these peoples in this area were the Massachusett to the south and the Pawtucket here in the north, with the Charles River as their meeting place.⁹

How much the English learned from them is shown by the words they borrowed: not only sachem (chief), squaw, papoose, wampum and powwow; but the animals muskrat, skunk, woodchuck (Narragansett ockqutchaun), moose, quahog, the fish scup and tautog; the foods squash and succotash and many place names. Massachusett means “great-hill-small-place,” referring to hills around the Boston Basin. Cambridgeport was called Anmoughcawgen (An-mou-CAW-gen, “gen” rhymes with “hen”), meaning “fishing weir” or “beaver dam,” or maybe “the place for curing fish”.¹⁰ Mystic, the River, means “great tidal river.”¹¹ Alewife Brook, which was deep enough to boat in, was called Menotomy River, and the land around it, Menotomy Plain. Its meaning has been forgotten, since the Massachusett language is extinct, although it’s being revitalized as Wampanoag.¹²

Part Two: Colonial History

EUROPEANS

Although the earliest documented Europeans were French fishermen in the mid-16th century, the first settlement in New England was the 102 pilgrims in the Plymouth Plantation in 1620. By then, the Great Dying, likely from disease spread by rodents aboard the colonists’ ships, had killed up to 95% of the native population, leaving “a ghostly landscape of abandoned fields, deserted camps, [and] a remnant population living in fortified villages, fearful of attack…”.¹³

NEWE TOWNE

In 1630 English colonists settled in a new town on the banks of the Charles, which they creatively called Newe Towne. To the northwest lay the Fresh Pond Moraine, whose northern point was Jones’ Hill, now Avon Hill, at 80 ft. the highest elevation in Cambridge, sometimes called Gallow’s Hill, where most infamously Mark and Phillis, two enslaved people who had poisoned their enslaver, were hanged and burned.

The “Highway to Menotomy” ran due north through the commonlands, and then swung westward around the steep moraine at Jones’ Hill and out across the Menotomy Plain (North Cambridge and into Arlington).¹⁴ This is why Mass Ave. still bends at Porter Square. Because it was a level road through open land, it became the axis of expansion for Cambridge in the 17th century.¹⁵ This was later called the Road to Concord, Country Highway, Great Road, North Avenue, and finally Massachusetts Avenue.

THE WEIR

In 1636 Newtown and New College were officially established as a town and college in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Two years later the town was renamed Cambridge, and in 1639 the college was renamed Harvard College.¹⁶

Cambridge Town Records show John Clark was instructed in 1635, before the town was even established, to “make a suffcient Weir to Catch Alwiffs vppon Menotomies River… and … sell … vnto Inhabetants of the Towne and noe other … all the Aylwifs he shall take at 3 shillings sixpence pr thousand.”¹⁷

This weir (fish trap), formerly the site of a native weir, was commissioned in 1635 by the new town of New Towne, at the 20-foot-wide Menotomy River (now Alewife Brook). It was so important as food and fertilizer that the town line with Charlestown (Somerville) was drawn to make sure it was on the New Towne side. Alewives, the herring-like fish caught there, were so plentiful that even in the early 1900s a resident, Russell Cook, remembered them being so plentiful during the spawning season that “one could walk across on them.” The court “ordered that all weers shal be set open” on Sundays so the fish could swim freely.

The small stream joining Menotomy River near the weir was later called Tannery Brook, and the Cartway to the Weir is now Churchill Ave. and Matignon Rd. Alewives, the small fish caught there, were essential to the colonists not only directly as food, but also as fertilizer. Even the boundary with Charlestown, called the “eight mile line” (now the Cambridge-Somerville boundary) was surveyed to include the weir on the Newtown side, which is why where Gold Star Road is now is on this side of the Somerville border. A “cartway to the wear” led from the Concord highway, past a small brook that crossed the Ware Field. This is now Churchill Avenue and Matignon Road, the oldest streets off Mass Ave. in North Cambridge. In terms of current-day streets, this small brook, later called Tannery Brook, started near Seven Hills Park, Somerville, passing Gold Star Road near Seven Pines, and joining the Menotomy where the Serbian Church is now on Alewife Parkway.¹⁸

The Queene of Mistick

This weir had almost certainly been used by the fortified Indigenous village west of the Mystic Lakes, led by Nanepashemet or “New Moon”, who had been the Sachem of the whole Pawtucket Confederation, until he was killed by Mi’kmaqs in 1619.¹⁹ His widow was known only as Sq– Sachem, or Queen of the Mistick, since the names of living sachems were not spoken out of respect.²⁰ Her domain stretched roughly from Charlestown, to Concord, to Marblehead.²¹ Her own tribe had lost most of its people in the Great Dying, and tens of thousands of Puritans were arriving, mostly from East Anglia, in the Great Migration. Making the best of a dire situation, she made several sales of her land, including Cambridge, probably in 1639.²² Although like the other sachems she was eventually forced to submit to Colonial law, she became a successful legal advocate for herself and her people.

The Sachem died before King Phillip’s War/Metacom’s Resistance, whose 350th anniversary was in 2025, marking the end of the Algonquian world. Most of the remaining Algonquian villages were destroyed and their inhabitants killed or kidnapped, sold to Barbados as enslaved people, leaving Cambridge all but abandoned to the English colonists.²³

THE OUTWASH

At first, the house lots in Newtowne were granted only “in the Towne” near Harvard Square, and the planting lots nearby, following the medieval open-field system. However, in 1634 as more distant divisions were granted, this restriction was relaxed, so owners could build houses directly on their planting lots. The broad plain of glacial outwash that stretched a mile and beyond from current-day Porter Square to Alewife Brook, where the sandy soil was a fine loam, well-drained by small brooks, was the most attractive in Northwest Cambridge.

FIRST SETTLEMENT

The first lot granted in what is now Upper Mass Ave. (i.e. northwest of Beech Street) was made in 1638 to Edmund Frost, along the town line beside the brook to the Ware Field (later called Tannery Brook). This triangular lot along the Somerville border ran from what are now Clarendon to Cameron Avenues, including a third of what is now Gold Star Road.²⁴

Edmund Frost, a Puritan, was one of the first to flee “for refuge to this then savage wilderness [of New Towne] to escape the more savage [religious] oppression” of England.²⁵ In Newtowne, he became an original member and one of the first two ruling elders of the First Church, and therefore, in the theocratic Bay Colony, also of the town, as well as a member of the first Board of Governors of New College (Harvard). A visitor to his house in Old Cambridge remarked, “… I would rather abide with ys saint in his poor cottage, than with any one of ye princes I know of at ys day in ye world.”²⁶

17TH CENTURY

By 1691, there were a dozen farms in North Cambridge, mostly near the Concord highway (Mass Ave.), with an estimated population of 65 people, plus some servants and hired laborers. Phillip Cook’s widow and son Samuel lived on a farm covering part of Gold Star Road which her husband had acquired from the original Frost grant. Their house was where Washburn Terrace is now. Our neighbor to the north near the fish weir was John Dickson. John Dickson, Jr. later had a shop and cider mill at present-day Churchill and Mass Ave. Just to the south (near present Locke Street) lived Abraham Watson. Both Cook and Watson acquired their land in 1687, almost 50 years after Edmund Frost.

Remember their names: Cook, Dickson, Watson. All three were Cambridge yeomen (small farmers owning their own land), with planting lands in the Line Field, as the area just across the Charlestown line was called. Most of the land in North Cambridge north of the great swamp was still common land, including a large ox pasture. Rindge Avenue, Cedar Street and Harvey Street are relic agricultural ways between the various field divisions through this pasture.

18TH CENTURY

By the time of the Revolution, the Watson family together owned the largest part of the land north of present-day Porter Square, and the area became known as Watson’s Plain, lined with many prosperous farms and new shops. The Watson family homestead was at Watson’s Corner (now Massachusetts and Rindge Avenues), built by John Watson in the 1660s. The Ox Pasture and Ware Field had been surveyed and divided in 1703. In 1724 the land between the Charlestown line and the old Ox Pasture (Somerville line to Cedar Street) was laid out, confirming the width of the Menotomy Highway as six rods (99 feet), considerably wider than it is today, though full of dust, mud, or ruts according to the season.

REVOLUTION AT WATSON’S CORNER

Almost all the 18th century growth was here in Watson’s Plain, about 20 houses in the preceding 50 years. Perhaps the same adventurous spirit that drew them here made this the heart of the Revolutionary landscape, quite unlike Old Tory Row, and even the Fresh Pond area.²⁷ In 1775 William Dawes made his famous ride past the farms on Watson’s Plain about midnight, including the oldest house, Samuel Cook’s, built by his grandfather before 1650 (now Washburn Terrace).²⁸ At Watson’s Corner the British regulars retreating from Lexington were unsuccessfully ambushed by the colonists, one of the first skirmishes of the American Revolution.

Almost all the houses built in North Cambridge before the Revolution have been destroyed, although the Cook and Dickson farmhouses survived long enough to be photographed. The only two surviving pre-revolution houses in North Cambridge were both at Watson’s Corner, likely drawn down the street on logs by teams of oxen or horses to their new sites. Abraham Watson Junior’s Georgian-style house, formerly next-door to Watson’s Corner, where SuperCuts is now, was moved to Sherman Street (it’s now yellow, with a plaque), and his brother Daniel’s house is now in Old Cambridge.

Coda

We have surveyed the early history of what was to become Gold Star Road: the glacial landscape and underlying bedrock, the people here during the Paleolithic, Archaic, Woodland, and Colonial periods, and their effect on the landscape. In the 19th century, the ice on glacial Fresh Pond, the clay in the great swamp, and Watson’s Plain’s fertile soil suitable for grazing cattle became the raw materials for the growth of industries, the need for workers created population growth, and the growth of roads, bridges, and railways allowed industries and people to flourish. Stay tuned for that story!

1. Newton Chute, Glacial geology of the Mystic Lakes-Fresh Pond area, Massachusetts; Geological Survey Bulletin 1061-F, USGS (1959), Plate 14 ; Digital images, USGS Publications Warehouse (https://www.usgs.gov/publications/glacial-geology-mystic-lakes-fresh-pond-area-massachusetts , accessed 18 August 2025). ↩︎
2. George Ehrenfried, “This Old Land of Cambridge”, Cambridge Conservation Commission (http://rwinters.com/history/ehrenfried.htm , accessed 18 August 2025). ↩︎
3. “The Avalonian Rocks of the Boston Basin and Their Ancient Depositional Environment”, in Brookline Rocks! A geological web site about Brookline, Massachusetts, Online https://www.brooklinerocks.org/avalonian-rocks-of-brookline , accessed 7 September 2025). ↩︎
4. Chute, Glacial geology of the Mystic Lakes-Fresh Pond area, Plate 14. ↩︎
5. Arthur J. Krim et al., Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge, Report Five: Northwest Cambridge, (Cambridge: The Cambridge Historical Commission, 1977), 5; Digital images, MIT, MIT Press Direct (http://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph-pdf/2298499/book_9780262367905.pdf ; accessed 18 August 2025). Also see Jesse Leavenworth, “Did people in prehistoric Connecticut hunt mastodons? Discoveries in Avon, Farmington hint at Ice Age scene”, Hartford Courant 26 March 2022, online archives (https://www.courant.com/2022/03/26/did-people-in-prehistoric-connecticut-hunt-mastodons-discoveries-in-avon-farmington-hint-at-ice-age-scene/ , accessed 18 Aug 2025). ↩︎
6. Margaret B. Davis, “Quaternary History of Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America and Europe”, Ann. Missouri Bot. Gard. 1983, 550-563; online Internet Archive ( https://archive.org/details/biostor-12744/page/555/mode/2up , accessed 27 January 2026). ↩︎
7. Allen Lutins (Graduate School of the State University of New York, Binghamton), “Prehistoric Fishweirs in Eastern North America”, Master’s Thesis, 1992 (https://www.lutins.org/thesis/#4.7 , accessed 18 August 2025). Also see Krim, Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge, Report Five, 5. ↩︎
8. Krim, Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge, Report Five, 5. ↩︎
9. “Naumkeag people”, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naumkeag_people , accessed 18 August 2025). ↩︎
10. “Origin of Names of US States”, U.S. Department of the Interior: Indian Affairs, ( https://www.bia.gov/as-ia/opa/online-press-release/origin-names-us-states#:~:text=MASSACHUSETTS%3A%20First%20of%20the%20States,as%20seen%20from%20the%20bay.%22 , accessed 19 August 2025). Also see Sage Carbone, “You live in Anmoughcawgen”, Cambridge Day 27 Feb 2023, online https://www.cambridgeday.com/2023/02/27/you-live-in-anmoughcawgen/ , accessed 18 August 2025)
    Also see Krim, Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge, Report Five, 6. ↩︎
11. “River History”, Mystic River Watershed Association (https://mysticriver.org/history , accessed 18 August 2025). For the name Menotomy, see Jim Porter, ” The True Meaning of Menotomy”, 1st revised edition, Arlington Historical Society (https://arlingtonhistorical.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/truemeaningofmenotomy.pdf , accessed 23 August 2025). ↩︎
12. “Massachusett language”, Timeline of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Cambridge,_Massachusetts , accessed 19 August 2025). ↩︎
13. ibid. Also see Mary Ellen Lepionka, “The Great Dying 1616-1619, ‘By God’s visitation, a Wonderful Plague.’”, Historic Ipswich, https://historicipswich.net/2023/11/17/the-great-dying/ , accessed 18 August 2025. ↩︎
14. For Gallows Hill, see Thomas F. O’Malley, “Gallows Hill, the Ancient Place of Execution”, The Cambridge Historical Society Proceedings, October 1923 (Cambridge Historical Society: Cambridge, 1931), 46-53. ↩︎
15. Krim, Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge, Report Five, 10. ↩︎
16. “Timeline of Cambridge, Massachusetts” Wikipedia. ↩︎
17. John A. Holmes, “The Ancient Fish Weir on Menotomy River”, The Proceedings of the Cambridge Historical Society, 1910, 32-43; Online History Cambridge (https://historycambridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Proceedings-Volume-5-1910.pdf , accessed 25 August 2025). ↩︎
18. Walker, “Map of Cambridge and Somerville, Mass” (Walker Lith. & Pub. Co. : Boston, 1913); online Harvard Map Collection, Harvard University (https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/scanned-maps/catalog/44-990142727990203941 , accessed 23 August 2023). ↩︎
19. Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: Remapping A New History of King Philip’s War, “The Saunkskwa of Missitekw”; online https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/missitekw-3 , accessed 22 August 2025. ↩︎
20. “Squaw Sachem”, History of American Women (https://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2008/04/squaw-sachem-of-mistick.html , accessed 19 August 2025). ↩︎
21. Porter, ” The True Meaning of Menotomy”, 16. ↩︎
22. Rev. Lucius Paige, History of Cambridge, 1877; Chapter 20: Indian History; Online Cambridge Civic Journal Forum (http://cambridgecivic.com/?p=9048 , accessed 26 August 2025). ↩︎
23. “Ipswich, the Brookfield Massacre and King Philip’s War”, Historic Ipswich, https://historicipswich.net/2023/11/08/brookfield-massacre/ , accessed 18 August 2025. Also see Linford D Fisher, ‘“Why shall wee have peace to bee made slaves”: Indian Surrenderers During and After King Philip’s War’, Ethnohistory. 2017;64(1):91-114; online PubMed Central (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5654607/, accessed 18 March 2026). ↩︎
24. Krim, Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge, Report Five, 11. ↩︎
25. Thomas Frost and Edward Frost, The Frost Family in England and America, with Special Reference to Edmund Frost and Some of His Descendents (Russell Printing Company: Buffalo, 1909); online https://www.seekingmyroots.com/members/files/G002415.pdf , accessed 29 August 2025, 49, quoting Colonel Goffe’s journal. But also see “Edmund Frost (abt. 1609 – 1672)”, Wikitree, https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Frost-824 , accessed 18 August 2025, which disputes some of these claims. ↩︎
26. Ibid, 44, quoting Colonel William Goffe, in his “Diary,”. ↩︎
27. ibid, 60. ↩︎
28. ibid, 15. ↩︎