No person's name appears among the town officers as sexton, nor yet the title; there was then no ‘Cemetery Committee,’ the selectmen attended to such duty. They (that year) recommended the consolidation of the selectmen, highway supervisors, and overseers of the poor into one board of five members, instead of the former three boards of three, which was done, and so continued under the town government.
Receiving such a statement of town affairs certain days before the town-meeting day, citizens had opportunity, and thoughtful tax payers scrutinized the pages carefully, and came to town meeting prepared to discuss proposed measures, their need and cost, and vote accordingly. If, after consideration, work was intrusted to their execution, there was reasonable chance of its being done within the appropriation. Those were the days of actual cost, rather than ‘cost plus’ of more recent date.
To the average reader the ‘town report’ is rather dry reading matter, but to the citizen of average means, who by industry and thrift is striving for the ownership of a home and finds the present heavy taxation a burden, an examination of the account of public expenditure is of real interest.
Allusion has been made to the report of 1870. We have before us our entire lot for fifty years. They are not cast in one mold, though their pages are of uniform size. Some have details omitted by others; some reports are prolix, others very brief. A few have the records of town meetings. Some make especial note of some public enterprise to the neglect of other. For the year 1890 the book is of over six hundred pages, the valuation list occupying one-third. That year and the next the town had six voting precincts for elections, the precursor of what was coming. The census of 1890 gave 11,790 as Medford's population.
