We have thus ‘swung around the circle,’ a cycle of over fifty-six years of personal knowledge and observation, and while writing, much aside from business within these limits has recurred to our memory. In Mystic Hall has been the Lyceum and Library Association, the Mystic Sunday School, the Christian Union. A Congregational Church was formed there, also a Universalist, and later the West Medford Baptist, and Shiloh Church for a time. Numerous caucuses and public gatherings were there convened. Brooks Commandery, U. O. G. C., and Royal Arcanum met there for several years.
The first house of worship of the Congregational parish was built in 1873 at corner of Harvard avenue and Bower street, and when burned (March, 1903) Holton Hall served for a time. St. Raphael's Church first assembled in the lower hall. Pitman's dancing academy was its first occupant, and political meetings and rallies of various kinds were held there.
One enterprise did not succeed, a photographer in the little upstairs hall next the railroad. Later some good people of extreme views held religious services, and were followed by a Primitive Methodist Church for about a year and a half.
Perhaps twenty-five tenements or dwellings have been within the described space, the number not increasing, as witness the one-story blocks later built. The fire station has moved from without to within our described bounds. Its apparatus is in marked contrast to the old two-wheeled hose carriage housed in Daniel Richardson's stable in 1871. But we remember that Spot pond water had but then just come, and that all the gas we had was of our own make and didn't illuminate. Electric light was then a dream, telephone ditto, automobile more unlikely.
Five buildings still remain to be mangled, moved or demolished to complete the widening act on High street, but Mystic Hall, built for a community center in 1852,
