Medford, Massachusetts

Medford is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. English colonists settled the area in 1630 as part of Charlestown in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and it was incorporated as a city in 1892. In the nineteenth century its yards built clipper ships, and rum was among its industries. Tufts University, chartered in 1852, has its campus on the Medford-Somerville line. The mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon, founder of information theory, spent his last years with Alzheimer's disease and died in Medford on 24 February 2001.