It is easy to let an unhistoric imagination range freely over the situation in the Tufts family about 1670. If Peter was married or about to marry, and old Peter had with him in the old farmhouse a family of two other sons and six daughters, the house may have been a little crowded. Congestion did not trouble families as much then as it does today, apparently, for Captain Peter brought up a family of seven sons and seven daughters in the Cradock house, but this family was well to do and Captain Peter was captain of the military company and for thirteen year's Medfords first representative lo the General Court. At all events, father or son built the new brick house, and Captain Peter was probably the first to dwell in it, somewhere between 1677 and 1680. I like to think that perhaps he took there his first bride, Elizabeth, in 1670, and that there was born in 1676 Anna, the first birth recorded on the extant Medford records. At all events, it must have been standing ready for his high-born second wife, Mary Cotton, who came in 1684 to him with the blood of two New Hampshire governors and a poetess in her veins, for she was granddaughter of Ann Dudley, the poetess. Her father had the splendid name of the Reverend Seaborn Cotton, and belonged undoubtedly to that distinguished family of ministers. The first son by this marriage was named Cotton Tufts, a son who died too soon to suffer jest upon his name. Another child who was to mean much to the later history of Medford was Simon Tufts, graduated at Harvard in 1724, the first physician of Medford. It was Dr. Simon Tufts who was the warm personal friend of Isaac Royall and used his powers of persuasion to hold
