Middlesex County, Massachusetts: History
The county was created by the Massachusetts General Court on May 10, 1643, when it was ordered that "the whole plantation within this jurisdiction be divided into four shires." Middlesex initially contained Charlestown, Cambridge, Watertown, Sudbury, Concord, Woburn, Medford, and Reading. In 1649 the first Middlesex County Registry of Deeds was created in Cambridge.
On April 19, 1775, Middlesex was the site of the first armed conflict of the American Revolutionary War.
In 1855, the Massachusetts State Legislature created a minor Registry of Deeds for the Northern District of Middlesex County in Lowell.
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, Boston annexed several of its adjacent cities and towns including Charlestown and Brighton from Middlesex County, resulting in an enlargement and accretion toward Suffolk County.
Beginning prior to the dissolution of the executive county government, the county comprised two regions with separate county seats for administrative purposes:
The Middlesex-North District (smaller) with its county seat in Lowell under the Registry of Deeds consisted of the city of Lowell, and its adjacent towns of Billerica, Carlisle, Chelmsford, Dracut, Dunstable, Tewksbury, Tyngsborough, Westford and Wilmington.
The Middlesex-South District (larger) with the county seat in Cambridge consisted of the remaining 44 cities and towns of Middlesex County.
Since the start of the 21st century, much of the current and former county offices have physically decentralized from the Cambridge seat, with the sole exceptions being the Registry of Deeds and the Middlesex Probate and Family Court, which both retain locations in Cambridge and Lowell. Since the first quarter of 2008, the Superior Courthouse has been seated in the city of Woburn; the Sheriff's Office is now administratively seated in the city of Medford and the Cambridge-based County Jail has since been amalgamated with another county jail facility in Billerica. The Cambridge District Court (which has jurisdiction for Arlington, Belmont and Cambridge); along with the Middlesex County District Attorney's Office, although not a part of the Middlesex County government, was also relatedly forced to relocate to Medford at the time of the closure of the Superior Courthouse building in Cambridge.