USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge > Cambridge fifty years a city, 1846-1896; an account of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 2-3, 1896 > Part 3
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CAMBRIDGE FIFTY YEARS A CITY.
into the self-satisfied mood that is the surcst index of narrow- ness and provincialism, we may legitimately pride ourselves. In commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of Cambridge as a eity, a retrospect of the half-century is need- ful ; but we shall find it pleasant to go farther back, and start with a glimpse of the beginnings of our town.
I came near saying " humble beginnings; " it is a stock phrase, and perhaps savors of tautology, since beginnings are apt to be humble as compared with long-matured results. But an adjective which better suits the beginnings of our Cam- bridge is "dignified." Circumstances of dignity attended the selection of this spot upon the bank of Charles River as the site of a town, and there was something peculiarly dignified in the circumstances of the change of vocation which determined the change in its name. The story is a very different one from that of the founding of towns in the Old World in the semi- barbarous times when the art of nation-making was in its infancy. In those earlier ages it was only through prolonged warfare against enemies nearly equal in prowess and resources, that a free political life could be maintained; and it was only after numberless crude experiments that nations could be formed in which political rights could be efficiently preserved for the people. All the training that such long ages of turbu- lence could impart had been gained by our forefathers in the Old World. To the founders of our Cambridge it had come as a rich inheritance. They were not as the rough followers of Alaric or Hengist. They had profited by the work of Roman civilization, with its vast and subtle nexus of legal and political ideas. In the hands of their fathers had been woven the won- derful fabric of English law ; they were familiar with parlia- mentary institutions ; they had been brought up in a country where the king's peace was better preserved than anywhere else in Europe, and where at the same time self-government was maintained in full vigor. They had profited, moreover, by the scholastic learning of the Middle Ages and the Greek scholarship, of the Renaissance, nor was the newly awakening spirit of scientific inquiry, visible in Galileo and Gilbert, lost upon their keen and inquisitive minds. These Puritans, heirs to what was strongest and best in the world's culture, came to Massachusetts Bay in order to put into practice a theory of civil government, in which the interests both of liberty and of
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ORATION BY JOHN FISKE.
godliness seemed to them likely to be best subserved. They came to plant the most advanced civilization in the midst of a heathen wilderness, and thus the selection of a seat of govern- ment for the new commonwealth was an affair of dignity and importance.
Half a dozen towns, including Boston, had already been be- gun, when it was decided that a site upon the bank of Charles River, three or four miles inland, would be most favorable for the capital of the Puritan colony. It would be somewhat more defensible against a fleet than the peninsula of Boston and Charlestown. The war-ships to be dreaded at that moment were not so much those of any foreign power as those of King Charles himself, for none could tell that the grim clouds of civil war then lowering upon the horizon of England and Scot- land might not also darken the coast of Massachusetts Bay. When the site was selected, on the 28th of December, 1630, it was agreed that the governor, deputy-governor, and all the Court of Assistants (except Endicott, already settled at Salem) should build their houses here. Fortunately no name was be- stowed upon the new town. It was known simply as the New Town, and here in the years before 1638 the General Court was several times assembled. During those seven years the number of Puritans in New England increased from about 1500 to nearly 20,000. It was also clear that the king's troubles at home were likely to keep him from molesting Mas- sachusetts. With the increased feeling of security, Boston came to be preferred as the seat of government, and only two of its members ever fulfilled the agreement to build their houses in the New Town.
The building of the New Town, however, furnished the occa- sion for determining at the outset what kind of government the Puritan commonwealth should have. It was to be a walled town, for defense against frontier barbarism of the New World type, not the formidable destructive power of an Attila or a Bayazet, but the feeble barbarism of the red men and the Stone Age, so that a wall of masonry was not required, but a wooden palisade would do. In 1632, the Court of Assistants imposed a tax of £60 for the purpose of building this palisade, but the men of Watertown refused to pay their share on the ground that they were not represented in the taxing body. The ensu- ing discussion resulted in the establishment of a House of Depu-
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CAMBRIDGE FIFTY YEARS A CITY.
tics, in which every town was represented. Henceforth the Court of Assistants together with the House of Deputies formed the General Court. There was no authority for such a repre- sentative body in the charter, which vested the government in the Court of Assistants ; but, as Hutchinson tells us, the people assumed that the right to such representation was implied in that clause of the charter which reserved to them the natural rights of Englishmen. Thus the building of a wooden palisade from Ash Street to Jarvis Field furnished the occasion for the first distinct assertion in the New World of the principles that were to bear fruit in the independence of the United States.
But the most interesting event in the history of the New Town before it became Cambridge was the brief sojourn of the Rev. Thomas Hooker and his company, from Braintree in Eng- land. In popular generalizations it is customary to allude to our Puritan forefathers as if they were all alike in their ways of thinking, whereas in reality it would be difficult to point out any group of men and women among whom individualism has more strongly flourished. Among the numberless differences of opinion and policy, it was only a few -and mostly such as were related to vital political questions - that blazed up in acts of persecution. For the disorganization wrought by Mrs. Hutchinson swift banishment seemed the only available remedy ; but slighter differences could be healed by a peaceful secession, which some people deprecated as the "removal of a candle- stick." Such a secession was that of Hooker and his friends. The difference between Hooker's ideal of government and Win- throp's has come to be recognized as in sonie measure fore- shadowing the different conceptions of Jefferson and Hamilton in later days. But of controversy between the two eminent Puritans only slight traces are left. One act of omission on the part of the friendly seceders is more forcible than reams of argument : the founders of Connecticut did not see fit to limit the suffrage by the qualification of church-membership.
The removal of so many people to the banks of the Connecti- cut left in the New Town only eleven families of those who had settled here before 1635. But depopulation was prevented by the arrival of a new congregation from England. There stands on our common a monument in commemoration of John Bridge, who was for many years a selectman of Cambridge, and dwelt beyond the western limits of the town, on or near the site since
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ORATION BY JOHN FISKE.
famous as the headquarters of Washington and the home of Longfellow. This John Bridge, deacon of the First Church, was one of the earliest settlers of the New Town, and one of the eleven householders that stayed behind, a connecting link between the old congregation of Thomas Hooker and the new congregation of Thomas Shepard. The coming of this eminent divine was undoubtedly an event of cardinal importance in the history of our community, for in the Hutchinson controversy, which shook the little colony to its foundations, his zeal and vigilance in exposing heresy were conspicuously shown ; and, if we may believe Cotton Mather, it was this circumstance that led to the selection of the New Town as the site for the pro- jected college. It was well for students of divinity to sit under the preaching of such a man, and of such as he might train up to succeed him. How vain were all such hopes of keeping this New English Canaan free from heresy was shown when Henry Dunster, first president of the college, was censured by the magistrates and dismissed from office for disapproving of infant baptism !
In the great English universities at that time Royalism and Episcopacy prevailed at Oxford, while Puritanism more or less allied with Republicanism was rife at Cambridge. Ever since the fourteenth century a superior flexibility in opinion had been observable in the eastern counties, whence came so many of the people that founded New England. Not only Hooker and Shepard. but most of our clergy, among whom individual- ism was so rife, were graduates of Cambridge. When it was decided that the New Town was to be the home of our college, it was natural for people to fall into the habit of calling it Cambridge ; and this name, so long enshrined already in their affections, already made illustrious by Erasmus and Fisher, by Latimer and Cranmer, by Burghley and Walsingham and the two Bacons, by Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson, - this name of such fame and dignity was adopted in 1638 by an order of the General Court. The map of the United States abounds in town names taken at random from the Old World, often inappropriate and sometimes ludicrous from the incongruity of associations. The name of our city is connected by a legiti- mate bond of inheritance with that of the beautiful city on the Cam. It was given in the thought that the work for scholar- ship, for godliness, and for freedom, which had so long been
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CAMBRIDGE FIFTY YEARS A CITY.
carried on in the older city, was to be continued in the younger. The name thus given was a pledge to posterity, and it has been worthily fulfilled.
Into tlic history of the town of Cambridge during the two centuries after it received its name, I do not propose to enter. But a glimpse of its general appearance during the greater part of that period is needful in order to give precision and the right sort of emphasis to the contrast which we see before us to-day. The Cambridge of those days was simply the seat of the college, not yet developed into a university. Within the memory of persons now living, Old Cambridge was commonly alluded to as " the village." In the original laying out of the township we seem to see a reminiscence of the ancient threefold partition into town mark, arable mark, and common. The "east gate," near the corner of Harvard and Linden streets, and the "west gate," at the corner of Ash and Brattle, marked the limits of the town in those directions. The town was at first comprised between Harvard Street and the marshes which cut off approach to the river bank. Afterward the " West End," from Harvard Square to Sparks Street, was gradually covered with home- steads. The common began, as now, hard by God's Acre, the venerable burying-ground, and afforded pasturage for the vil- lage cattle as far as Linnæan Street. The regions now occupied by Cambridgeport and East Cambridge contained the arable district with many farms, small and large, but everywhere salt marshes bordered the river and much of the country was a wild woodland. The tale of wolves killed in Cambridge for the year 1696 was seventy-six, and a bear was seen roaming as late as 1754. It was a rough country which the British first encoun- tered when they landed at Lechmere Point in 1775, on their night march to Lexington. Cambridge then turned its back toward Boston, to which the only approach was by a causeway and bridge at what we now call Boylston Street, and by this route the distance was eight miles, as we still read upon the ancient milestone in God's Acre. To complete our outline of the village, we must recall the principal public buildings, - the meeting-house, a little south of the site of Dane Hall, used both as church and as town-house until 1708, when a building was erected in the middle of Harvard Square to serve for town meetings and courts. A little eastward, near the " east gate," stood the parsonage. The schoolhouse was behind the site of
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ORATION BY JOHN FISKE.
Holyoke House ; the jail stood on the west side of Winthrop Square, which was then an open market. Between this market and Harvard Square, in the sanded parlor of the Blue Anchor Tavern, the selectmen held their meetings ; and on the corner of the street which still bears the name of Harvard's first presi- dent was something rarely to be seen in so small a village, the printing-press now known as the University Press, the only one in English America, until Boston followed the example in 1676.
Until the beginning of the present century these outlines of Cambridge remained with but little change, save for the build- ing of noble houses on spacious estates toward Mount Auburn in one direction and upon Dana Hill in the other. The occu- pants of many of these estates were members of the Church of England, and the building of Christ Church in 1759 was one marked symptom of the change that was creeping over the little Puritan community. It was a change toward somewhat wider views of life, and toward the softening of old animosities. In contrast with the age in which we live the whole eighteenth century in New England seems a slow and quiet time, when the public pulse beat more languidly, or at any rate less feverishly, than now. The people of New England led a comparatively isolated life.
Thought in our college town did not keep pace with Euro- pean centres of thought, as it does in our day. There was less hospitality toward foreign ideas. Few people visited Europe. Life in New England was thrown upon its own resources, and this was in great measure true of Cambridge in the days when it was eight miles from Boston and indefinitely remote from the mother country. One of the surest results of social isolation is the acquirement of peculiarities of speech, most commonly shown in the retaining of archaisms which fashionable language has dropped. That quaint Yankee dialect, of which Hosea Biglow says that
" For puttin' in a downright lick 1146766
'Twixt Humbug's eyes, ther's few can metch it,
An' then it helves my thoughts ez slick Ez stret-grained hickory doos a hetchet ;"
that dialect so sweet to the ears of every true child of New England, may still be heard if we go to seek it ; but in Lowell's
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CAMBRIDGE FIFTY YEARS A CITY.
boyhood it must have been a familiar sound in the neighbor- hood of Elmwood.
But the work done in this rustie college community, if done within somewhat narrow horizons, was eminently a widening and liberalizing work. The seeds of the nineteenth century were germinating in the eighteenth. Two or three indications must suffice, out of many that might be cited. In 1669 there was a schism in the First Parish of Boston, brought about by an attempt to revise the conditions of church-membership, in order to obviate some of the difficulties arising from the restric- tion of the suffrage to church-members, and the founding of the Old South Church by the more liberal party was a result of this schism. One hundred and sixty years later, in 1829, there was a schism in the First Parish of Cambridge, which resulted in the founding of the Shepard Church by the more conserva- tive party. The questions at issue between the two parties were the questions that divide Unitarian theology from Trini- tarian, and the distance between the kind of interests at stake in the earlier controversy and in the later may serve as a fair measure of the progress which the mind of Massachusetts had been making during that interval of a hundred and sixty years. In all that time the chief training school for the ministers by whom the speculative minds of Massachusetts were stimulated and guided was Harvard College. But it was here, too, that men eminent in civic life were trained ; and among the various illustrations of the type thus nurtured may be cited Samuel Adams and Thomas Hutchinson, foemen worthy of one another, Warren and Hancock, Jonathan Trumbull and John Adams. So far as New England was concerned, the chief work in bringing on the Revolution was done by graduates of Harvard. In the convention which framed our Federal Constitution, three important delegates were the Harvard men, Gerry, Strong, and King ; and in this connection one cannot fail to recall names so closely associated with our national beginnings as Timothy Pickering and Fisher Ames, nor can we omit the noble line of jurists from Parsons to Story, and so on to Curtis, whom so many of us well remember; or going back to that Massachusetts convention, of which the work is commemorated in the name of Federal Street, we may single out for men- tion the great minister and statesman, type of what is best in Puritanism, Samuel West, of New Bedford. Such names
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ORATION BY JOHN FISKE.
speak for the kind of quiet, unobtrusive work that was going on in Cambridge during those two centuries of rural existence. Such strengthening and unfolding of the spirit is the only work that is truly immortal. In a town like ours the material relics of the past are inspiring, and it is right that we should do our best to preserve them ; but they are perishable. The gambrel- roofed house from the door of which President Langdon asked God's blessing upon the men that were starting for Bunker Hill, in later days the birthplace and homestead of our be- loved Autocrat, has vanished from the scene ; the venerable elm under which Washington drew the sword in defense of American liberty is slowly dying year by year; but for the spiritual achievement that has marked the career of our com- munity there is no death, and they that have turned many to righteousness shall shine in our firmament as the stars for ever and ever.
In contrasting the Cambridge of the nineteenth with that of the two preceding centuries, the first fact which strikes our attention is the increase in the rate of growth. In 1680 the population of Cambridge seems to have been about 850, and the graduating class for that year numbered five. In 1793 the population - not counting the parishes that have since become Brighton and Arlington - was about 1200, and there was a graduating class of 38. Thus in more than a century the pop- ulation had increased barely fifty per cent. In 1793 there were only four houses east of Dana Street, but that year witnessed an event of cardinal importance, the opening of West Boston Bridge. The distance between Boston and Old Cambridge was thus reduced from eight miles to three, and a direct avenue was opened between the interior of Middlesex County and the Boston markets. The effect was shown in doubling the pop- ulation of Cambridge by the year 1809, when another bridge was complete from Lechmere Point to the north end of Boston. These were toll bridges in the hands of private corporations, and their success led to further bridges, the one at River Street in 1811, the one at Western Avenue in 1825, and Brookline Bridge so lately as 1850. The principal thoroughfares south and east of Old Cambridge were built as highways connecting with these bridges ; thus River Street and Western Avenue were tributary to West Boston Bridge, and to that point the Concord Turnpike was prolonged by Broadway, the Middlesex
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CAMBRIDGE FIFTY YEARS A CITY.
Turnpike by Hampshire Street, and the Medford Road by Webster Avenue ; while Cambridge Street, intersecting these avenues, formed a direct thoroughfare from the Concord and Watertown roads to the northern part of Boston. The coul- pletion of these important works led to projects for filling up the marshes and establishing docks in rivalry of Boston, - plans but very slightly realized before circumstances essentially changed them.
In this way Cambridge, which had hitherto faced the Brigh- ton mainland, turned its face toward the Boston peninsula, and two new villages began to grow up at "the Port " and "the Point," otherwise Cambridgeport and East Cambridge. It was not long before the new villages began in some ways to assert rivalry with the old one. The corporation which owned the bridge and large tracts of land at Lechmere Point naturally wished to increase the value of its real estate. Middlesex County needed a new court-house and jail. In 1757 a new court-house had been built on the site of Lyceum Hall, but in 1813 there was a need for something better; whereupon the Lechmere Point Corporation forthwith built a court-house and jail in East Cambridge, and presented them, with the ground on which they stood, to the county. In 1818 a lot of land in the Port, bounded by Harvard, Prospect, Austin, and Norfolk streets was appropriated for a poor-house. Soon afterward it was proposed to inclose our common, - which with the lapse of time had shrunk to about its present size, - and to convert it from a grazing ground into an ornamental park. The scheme met with vehement opposition, and the town-meetings in this growing community suddenly became so large that the old court-house in Harvard Square would not hold them. Accord- ingly a bigger town-house was built in 1832 on the eastern part of the poor-house lot, and thus was the civic centre removed from Old Cambridge.
This event served to emphasize the state of things which had been growing up with increasing rapidity since the beginning of the century. Instead of a single village, with a single circle of interests, there were now three villages, with interests diverse and sometimes conflicting as regards the expending of public money, so that feelings of sectional antagonism were developed.
In New England history the usual remedy for such a state of things has been what might be called " spontaneous fission."
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ORATION BY JOHN FISKE.
The overgrown town would divide into three, and the segments would go on pouting at each other as independent neighbors. We need not be surprised to learn that in 1842 the people of Old Cambridge petitioned to be set off as a separate town ; but this attempt was successfully opposed, with the result that in 1846 a city government was adopted. In that year the popu- lation had reached 13,000, and was approaching the point at which town-meetings become unmanageable from sheer bulk. For small communities Thomas Jefferson was probably right in holding that the town-meeting is the best form of government ever devised by man. It was certainly the form best loved in New England down to 1822, when Boston with its population of 40,000 reluctantly gave it up and adopted a representative government instead. The example of Boston was followed in 1836 by Salem and Lowell, and next in 1846 by Roxbury and Cambridge. From that time forth the making of cities went on more rapidly. It was the beginning of a period of urban development, the end of which we cannot as yet even dimly foresee. This unprecedented growth of cities is sometimes spoken of as peculiarly American, but it is indeed not less re- markable in Europe, and it extends over the world so far as the influence of railroad and telegraph extends. The influence of these agencies of communication serves to diffuse over wide areas the effects wrought by machinery at different centres of production. With increased demand for human energy, the earth's power of sustaining human life has vastly increased, and there is a strong tendency to congregate about centres of pro- duction and exchange. In 1846 there were but five cities in the United States with a population exceeding 100,000; New York had not yet reached half a million. To-day New York is approaching the two-million mark, three other cities have passed the million, and not less than thirty have passed the hundred thousand. During this half-century the 13,000 of Cambridge have increased to more than 80,000. The Cambridge of to-day contains as many people as the Boston of sixty years ago.
The causes of this growth of Cambridge might be treated, had we space for it, under three heads. Our city has grown because of its proximity to Boston ; it has grown by reason of its flourishing manufactures ; and it has grown with the growth of the university. That Cambridge should have shared in the general prosperity of this suburban region is but natural. But
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CAMBRIDGE FIFTY YEARS A CITY.
persons at a distance are apt to show surprise when we speak of it as a manufacturing city. This feature in our development belongs to the period subsequent to 1846, and has much to do with the growth of the eastern portions of Cambridge, where the combined facilities for railroad and water communication have been peculiarly favorable to manufactures. In the early part of this century the glass-works at East Cambridge, which have since departed, were somewhat famous, considerable manu- factures of soap and leather had been begun, and cars and wagons were made here. At the present time some of our chief manufactures are of engine boilers and various kinds of machin- ery, of which the annual product exceeds $2,000,000. Among the industries which produce in yearly value more than $1,000,000 may be mentioned printing and publishing, musical instruments (especially pianos and organs), furniture, clothing, carpenter's work, soap and candles, biscuit-baking; while among those that produce $500,000 or more are carriage-mak- ing and wheelwright's work, plumbing and plumber's materials, bricks and tiles, and confectionery. Not only our own new Harvard Bridge, but most of the steel railway bridges in New England, have been built in Cambridge. We supply a consid- erable part of the world with hydraulie engines, the United States Navy comes here for its pumps, and our pumping ma- chines may be seen at work in Honolulu, in Sydney, in St. Petersburg. In the dimensions of its pork-packing industry Cambridge comes next after Chicago and Kansas City. In 1842 all the fish-netting used in America was made in England ; to-day it is chiefly made in East Cambridge, which also fur- nishes the twine prized by disciples of Izaak Walton in many parts of the world. Last year the potteries on Walden Street turned out seven million flower-pots. Such facts as these bear witness to the unusual facilities of our city, where coal can be taken and freight can be shipped at the very door of the fac- tory, where taxes and insurance are not burdensome and the fire department is unsurpassed for efficiency, where skilled labor is easy to get because good workmen find life comfort- able and attractive, with excellent sanitary conditions and un- rivaled means of free education, even to the Latin School and the Manual Training School. It is well said, in one of the reports in our semi-centennial volume, that "to Cambridge herself, as much as to any other one thing, is the success of all
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