SOMERVILLE, a city of Middlesex county, Massachusetts, U.S.A., on the Mystic river, surrounded by Boston (Charles town), Cambridge, Arlington and Medford. It is served by the Boston and Maine railroad. Pop. (1920) 93,091 (26% foreign born white, over half from Canada, England and Ireland) and 103,908 in 1930 Federal census. The assessed valuation for 1927 was $116,406,900. Somerville, originally part of Charlestown, was settled in 1630. The greater part of John Winthrop's "Ten Hills Farm" lay within the present bounds of the city, and here in 1631 he built and launched the "Blessing of the Bay," the first ship built in Massachusetts. For more than a century the region was a sparsely settled farming community and the only manufacturing industry of any importance was brick-making. On a hill in Nathan Tufts park stands a circular building of slate stone (3o ft. high, with a conical cap) originally built (about 1703) for a
windmill, and used for a powder house from 1756 to 1822, where Gen. Gage on Sept. 1, 1774, seized 25o half-barrels of powder. In 1775 it became the magazine of the American forces besieging Boston, and Somerville was the headquarters of Nathanael Greene and Charles Lee. On Prospect Hill, on July 18, 1775, Israel Putnam raised the "Appeal to Heaven" flag; and one of the earliest of the continental standards, the Union Jack and stripes, was raised here on Jan. 1, 1776. The opening of the Middlesex canal through Somerville in 1803 and of the Boston and Lowell railroad in 1835 gave an impetus to its growth. It was incorporated as a town in 1842, and in 1871 was chartered as a city. The output of its factories in 1927 was valued at $66,440,533.