Child (Lydia Maria) is born in Medford.

The daughter of abolitionists, Lydia Maria Child attends Medford schools, studies with her brother and Margaret Fuller, becomes a teacher, novelist and founds a children’s magazine. She marries lawyer David Child and moves to Boston in 1828, and lives on Roxbury Neck. Child writes an important pamphlet denouncing slavery in 1833,* that prompts William Lloyd Garrison to call her “The first woman in the Republic.” She also writes the popular song “Over the River and Through the Woods,” about a trip over the Mystic River, in 1844. Child moves to a farm in Wayland in 1852, and dies there on October 20, 1880.