USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge > History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630-1913 > Part 14
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40
such functions, welcomed him on the steps of University Hall. Edward Everett was the orator of the day, and the splendid peroration of his speech has rolled from the lips of schoolboy declaimers ever since. "Above all, the first of heroes and of men, the friend of your youth, the more than friend of his country, rests in the bosom of the soil he redeemed. On the banks of the Potomac he lies in glory and peace. You will revisit the hospitable shades of Mount Vernon, but him whom you venerated, as we did, you will not meet at its door. His voice of consolation, which reached you in the Austrian dungeons, cannot break its silence to bid you welcome to his own roof; but the grateful children of America will bid you welcome in his name. Welcome, thrice welcome to our shores; and withersoever, throughout the limits of the continent, your course shall take you, the ear that hears you shall bless you, the eye that sees you shall bear witness to you, and every tongue exclaim, with heartfelt joy, 'Welcome, welcome, Lafayette.' "
For many years after the exciting times of the Revolutionary epoch, Cambridge was a town with no especial distinction, save the scholastic atmosphere that hung about the College. The chief event of the closing years of the eighteenth and the opening years of the nineteenth centuries was the development of two new and almost distinct villages in the eastern part of the town. We have seen that the inhabited part of the town ended at Dana Hill. East of Judge Dana's house on the crest of the hill there were only the Inman house, near the present City Hall, and the old Phips farmhouse on the upland of Lechmere's Point. All else was pasture, swamp and salt marsh. The building of the West Boston Bridge altered the whole topography of the town. These changes were brought about chiefly through some interesting real estate speculations, in which certain new-comers to Cambridge were particularly active. When the estates of the departing Tories were sold, they were purchased by some men of large means and active minds, who were drawn to Cambridge, both by its attractions as a place of residence, and by the opportunity the place afforded for judicious investment. The Lechmere and Oliver estates were bought by Andrew Cabot of Salem, and
THE TOWN
93
the Vassal estates by Nathanael Tracy of New- buryport. The John Vassal house, which had been Washington's headquarters, passed, in 1792, into the possession of Andrew Craigie, and in the same year the heirs of Ralph In- man conveyed his estate to Leonard Jarvis. Meanwhile, Chief-Justice Francis Dana had acquired very large hold- ings of land and marsh along the Charles River, from the village to where the river widened into the Back Bay. His estate and the estate of Mr. Jarvis cov- ered practically all of what became Cam- bridgeport. In like man- ner, what is now East Cam- bridge came into the hands of two owners. The Phips farm had been di- vided among the children of Lieutenant- Governor Phips; but be- fore the war David Lech- mere, the hus- . werton Estate Scene-on the band of one of the daughters, hạd bought the shares of the others, with the exception of that owned by Mrs. Andrew Board- man. The Boardmans were patriots, but the
Birth place of T. W. Higginson"
Austin Houge 1657
Birth place of O.W.Holmes
Scott Street
Lechmeres, like all the rest of the Phips con- nection, were Tories. The Lechmere estate was confiscated and was bought, as we have seen, by Andrew Cabot. Through several trans- fers it passed to Andrew Craigie, who thus owned about five- sixths of the whole region known as Lech- mere's Point, while the Boardmans retained title to the south- westerly part of the old Phips farm, which reached to the bound- aries of the Jarvis estate. It was natu- ral that these gentlemen, Messrs. Dana, Jarvis, Craigie and Boardman, should thus become much interested in the develop- ment of the eastern part of the town.
For a hun- dred and thirty years the "Great Bridge" at the foot of Boylston Street had been the only means of getting across the river, ex- cept by boat.
On March 9, 1792, Judge Dana and sundry associates were incorporated as the "Proprie- tors of West Boston Bridge," with authority
94
A HISTORY OF CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
to build a toll bridge from the westerly part of Boston to Pelham's Island in the town of Cambridge. The toll franchise was to run for forty years, and from the tolls the pro- prietors were required to pay three hundred pounds a year to Harvard College. The bridge was at once constructed, together with a cause- way over the marshes, as far as the present Lafayette Square, where it connected with the slightly higher ground known as Pelham's Island. The bridge was opened for travel on November 23, 1793. It required a complete readjustment of the roads. Until this time the
later extended it from the Common to the new bridge, along what is now Broadway. The other built the Middlesex turnpike, of which the eastern end leading to the bridge is the present Hampshire Street. Houses, stores and taverns began to spring up along the cause- way and on the streets, as they were laid out below Central Square. The big estates were gradually divided off into lots; and Judge Dana and Mr. Jarvis built a substantial dike along the marshes where the river bent to the north- east, thus reclaiming a considerable section of low-lying land. Ambitious plans were made
Houdın
Dorgemont
"VIEW OF THE COLLEGES AT CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS" 1795
old roads, one running from Charlestown Neck to Watertown, and the other from the Great Bridge to Menotomy and crossing on the Com- mon, had remained the highways. Now a new set of roads came into being. Main Street and Massachusetts Avenue continued the new causeway to Harvard Square; and radiating from this highway were River Street and West- ern Avenue to the southwest, and Hampshire Street and Medford Street (now Webster Ave- nue) to the northwest. Two turnpike com- panies were incorporated. One built the road to Concord, which is now Concord Avenue, and
for transforming the river-bank into a com- mercial port. Docks and canals were dug out of the salt marsh, and, in 1805, Cambridge was made a port of entry. Then came reverses. Mr. Jarvis became financially involved, and his property was long in litigation, so that it had to be withdrawn from sale. Mr. Board- man, however, in 1801, brought his large hold- ings into the market by laying out Windsor Street through his land, thus giving it a con- nection with the bridge and the fast-growing village of Cambridgeport. The Jarvis estate was sold at auction, and Mr. Jonathan L.
THE TOWN
95
Austin, who bought the old Inman mansion, opened Austin Street. From this time the building went on rapidly, though Judge Dana retained all the older part of his estate, so that between Hancock Street and the College Yard there remained a large district without houses, and Cambridgeport was a distinct and separate village. The effort to make it a commercial center ran against the Embargo Act of 1808 and the War of 1812. The commerce of the whole country was paralyzed, and most of the promoters of the port of Cambridge were brought to bankruptcy. Of all the docks constructed
be genuine, must have in it some sentiment of the sea,-it was this instinct that printed the device of the pine-tree on the old money and the old flag,-and these periodic ventures of the sloop Harvard made the old Viking fibre vibrate in the hearts of all the village boys. ... All our shingle vessels were shaped and rigged by her, who was our glass of naval fashion and our mould of aquatic form. We had a secret and wild delight in believing that she carried a gun, and imagined her sending. grape and canister among the treacherous savages of Oldtown. Inspired by her were those first
Fisher, Pinzt
Annin & Smith, Sc.
"SOUTH VIEW OF THE SEVERAL HALLS OF HARVARD COLLEGE" 1823
by the various companies only Broad Canal remains.
"Cambridge," wrote Lowell of the town as it was in 1824, "has long had its port, but the greater part of its maritime trade was, thirty years ago, intrusted to a single Argo, the sloop Harvard, which belonged to the College, and made annual voyages to that vague Orient known as Down East, bringing back the wood that, in those days, gave to winter life at Har- vard a crackle and a cheerfulness, for the loss of which the greater warmth of anthracite hardly compensates. New England life, to
essays at navigation on the Winthrop duck- pond, of the plucky boy who was afterwards to serve two famous years before the mast.
"The greater part of what is now Cambridge- port was then (in the native dialect) a 'huckle- berry pastur.' Woods were not wanting on its outskirts, of pine, and oak, and maple, and the rarer tupelo with downward limbs. Its veins did not draw their blood from the quiet old heart of the village, but it had a distinct being of its own, and was rather a great caravan- sary than a suburb. The chief feature of the place was its inns, of which there were five, with
96
A HISTORY OF CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
vast barns and court-yards, which the railroad was to make as silent and deserted as the palaces of Nimroud. Great white-topped wagons, each drawn by double files of six or eight horses, with its dusty bucket swinging from the hinder axle, and its grim bull-dog trotting silent under- neath, or in midsummer panting on the lofty perch beside the driver (how elevated thither baffled conjecture), brought all the wares and products of the country to their mart and sea- port in Boston. These filled the inn-yards, or were ranged side by side under broad-roofed sheds, and far into the night the mirth of their lusty drivers clamored from the red-curtained bar-room, while the single lantern, swaying to and fro in the black cavern of the stables, made a Rembrandt of the group of ostlers and horses below. There were, besides the taverns, some huge square stores where groceries were sold, some houses, by whom or why inhabited was to us boys a problem, and, on the edge of the marsh, a currier's shop, where, at high tide, on a floating platform, men were always beating skins in a way to remind one of Don Quixote's fulling mills."
The development of East Cambridge was chiefly the work of Mr. Andrew Craigie, who for ten or twelve years was most assiduous and successful in securing title to large tracts, and obtaining from the General Court the authority to build another bridge. His speculation turned out very well. It has been estimated that the land and franchises, which were quietly secured, and often in the names of relatives or associates, did not cost Mr. Craigie more than twenty thousand dollars. In 1808 he organized a stock company, and, reserving enough land for the bridge, its approaches and toll house, he dis- posed of the rest of the estate at a price of three hundred and sixty thousand dollars. The next year the Craigie Bridge was built, and roads and approaches constructed, of which the chief was the present Cambridge Street, which con- nected the bridge with Cambridge Common and the country beyond. In 1810 the stock company was incorporated as the Lechmere Point Corporation, lots were surveyed and the streets of East Cambridge laid out. The sales were, however, unsatisfactory, and in the first three years only ten lots were sold. Then the Corporation offered to give to Middlesex County
a whole square and a half of land, and to build a County Courthouse and jail at an expense of twenty-four thousand dollars, if the county would use and occupy the buildings. The town of Cambridge protested against the re- moval of the courthouse from Harvard Square, but the offer was too munificent a one to be resisted. The buildings were erected, and the courts began to be held in East Cambridge in 1816. This ingenious plan worked well for the company, and when the Boston Porcelain and Glass Company bought another large tract and built its factories, the success of the specu- lation was assured. Other industries followed, and the population of East Cambridge rapidly increased. The proprietors of the two new bridges entered into a lively competition. Each party endeavored to secure the opening of streets which would serve as approaches to its own bridge, and to block the similar efforts of the other party. These rivalries kept the town meetings in a turmoil for a score of years.
Meanwhile the older part of the town saw but little change. The Cambridge of the first half of the nineteenth century was a good place to be born in, as Lowell and Holmes and Dana and Higginson have testified; and it was surely good to live in the place where Kirkland and Everett and Quincy ruled the academic world, where Longfellow came to write his poetry, and Palfrey his history, and Sparks his biographies; where Washington Allston painted and Margaret Fuller dreamed.
"Cambridge," wrote Lowell in his Fireside Travels, "was still (1824) a country village with its own habits and traditions, not yet feeling too strongly the force of suburban gravi- tation. Approaching it from the west, by what was then called the New Road (Mt. Auburn Street), you would pause on the brow of Sy- mond's Hill to enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid. In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, lindens and horse-chestnuts, which had seen Massachusetts a colony, and were fortunately unable to emigrate with Tories, by whom, or by whose fathers, they were planted. Over it rose the noisy belfry of the College, the square, brown tower of the Epis- copal Church, and the slim, yellow spire of the parish meeting-house. On your right, the Charles slipped smoothly through green and
97
THE TOWN
purple salt meadows, darkened here and there with the blossoming black grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow. To your left upon the Old Road (Brattle Street) you saw some half-dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting southward. ... We called it 'The Village' then, and it was essentially an English village-quiet, unspecu- lative, without enterprise, sufficing to itself, and only showing such differences from the original types as the public school and the sys- tem of town government might superinduce. A few houses, chiefly old, stood around the bare common, with ample elbow-room; and old women, capped and spectacled, still peered through the same windows from which they had watched Lord Percy's artillery rumble by to Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome Virginia general who had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. The hooks were to be seen from which had swung the hammocks of Burgoyne's captive red-coats. If memory does not deceive me, women still washed clothes in the town spring, clear as that of Bandalusia. One coach sufficed for all the travel to the metropolis."
Lowell saw the development of Cambridge from the idyllic village of his boyhood into a great suburban city bustling with many activ- ities. So rapid was the change that Lowell, on his return from Eurpoe in 1889, wrote:
"I feel somehow as if Charon had ferried me the wrong way, and yet it is into a world of ghosts that he has brought me. I hardly know the old road, a street now, that I have paced so many years, for the new houses. My old homestead seems to have a puzzled look in its eyes as it looks down-a trifle superciliously me thinks-on these upstarts."
Colonel Higginson, in describing the Cam- bridge of the first half of the nineteenth century, took as his text the familiar sketch of Harvard Square in 1822. "It seems at first sight," he wrote, "to have absolutely nothing in common with the Harvard Square of the present day, but to belong rather to some small hamlet of western Massachusetts. Yet it recalls with instantaneous vividness the scenes of my youth, and is the very spot through which Holmes, and Lowell, and Richard Dana, and Story the sculptor, and Margaret ·Fuller Ossoli, walked
daily to the post-office, or weekly to the church. The sketch was taken in the year before my own birth, but remained essentially unchanged for ten years thereafter, the population of the whole town having increased only from 3,295 in 1820, to 6,072 in 1830. The trees on the right overshadowed the quaint barber's shop of Marcus Reemie, crammed with quaint curi- osities; and also a building occupied by the law professor, its angle still represented by that of College House. The trees on the left were planted by my own father, as were nearly all the trees in the college yard, he being then the newly appointed steward-now rechristened bursar- of the college, and doing, as Dr. Pea- body has told us, the larger part of the treas- urer's duties. On the left, beyond the trees, stood the First Parish Church, with its then undivided congregation, its weathercock high in air, its seats within each lifted by a hinge, and refreshing every child by its bang and rattle when dropped after prayer time. In the center was the little Market House, which once gave the name of 'the Market Place' to what was later called, in my memory, 'the village.'
"The only larger building fully visible in the sketch is the only one of these yet remaining, having survived its good looks, if it ever had any, and very nearly survived its usefulness. The rooms now occupied as the waiting-room of the West End Railway (Boston Elevated) were then the bar-room and rear parlor of the Cambridge hotel; the two rooms being con- nected by a sliding panel, through which the host thrust any potations demanded by the guests in the parlor. There was held, in the rear room, I remember, a moderately convivial 'spread' in 1840, given by the speakers at an 'exhibition,'-a sort of intermediate Commence- ment Day, long since discontinued,-in which I, as the orator of the day, was supposed to take a leading part, although in fact I only con- tributed towards the singing, the speaking, and the payment of the bills.
"It is hard to convey an impression of the smallness of the then Cambridge in all its parts and the fewness of its houses. The house in which I was born, in 1823, and which had been built by my father, was that at the head of Kirkland Street, then Professors' Row,-the house now occupied by Mrs. F. C. Batchelder.
98
A HISTORY OF CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
The field opposite, now covered largely by Memorial Hall, was then an open common, where I remember to have seen students climb- ing or swinging on Dr. Charles Follen's outdoor gymnastic apparatus; or perhaps forming to trot away with him at double-quick, their hands clenched at their sides, across the country. The rest of the Delta was covered with apple-trees whose fruit we boys used to discharge at one another from pointed sticks. Looking down Professors' Row we could see but four houses, the open road then proceeding to Somerville. On Quincy Street there was no house between Professors' Row and Broadway, and we used
old houses of Tory Row and one or two late additions. On the south side of Brattle Street there was not a house from Hawthorn Street to Elmwood Avenue; all was meadow-land and orchards. Mt. Auburn Street was merely 'the back road to Mount Auburn,' with a delightful bathing place at Simond's Hill, be- hind what is now the hospital,-an eminence afterwards carted away by the city and now utterly vanished. Just behind it was a delicious nook, still indicated by one or two lingering trees, which we named 'The Bower of Bliss,' at a time when the older boys, Lowell and Story, had begun to read and declaim to us from
APPLETON CHAPEL
to play in what was said to be an old Indian cornfield, where the New Church Theological School now stands. Between Quincy Street and Cambridgeport lay an unbroken stretch of woods and open fields, and the streets were called 'roads,'- the Craigie Road and the Clark Road, now Harvard Street and Broadway, each with one house on what was already called Dana Hill. Going north from my father's house, there were near it the Holmes House and one or two smaller houses; up 'the Concord Road,' now Massachusetts Avenue, there were but few; the Common was unfenced until 1830; up Brattle Street there were only the
Spenser's 'Faerie Queene.' The old willows (now at the corner of Mt. Auburn Street and the Parkway) were an equally favorite play- place; we stopped there on our return from bathing, or botanizing, or butterflying and lay beneath the trees."
The meeting-house, in the time thus described, was still the town center. The sixty-seven years of the pastorate of Dr. Appleton came to an end in 1784, when he died, at the age of ninety-one. A few months before his death Rev. Timothy Hilliard was settled as his col- league and successor. Mr. Hilliard died in 1790, and two years later began the long and
THE TOWN
99
eventful pastorate of Dr. Abiel Holmes. The church members south of the river had been set off as a separate Parish in 1783, and settled the first minister in what became the town of Brighton in the next year. In 1805, the Cam- bridgeport Meeting-House Corporation was organized, which later built its church on Columbia Street, and, in 1814, ordained the first minister, Rev. Thomas Brattle Gannett. The Parish included all of the town east of the line of Dana Street, running from the river on the south to the Somerville boundary on the north. In 1814, also, the College Church was
present corner of Matthews Hall, was the Col- lege fire-engine house, before it was moved across the Square. Behind the church, stand- ing where it now stands, was the President's, or Wadsworth House, erected in 1726. To the eastward stood the two old houses heretofore described, but now owned by the College and rented to Professor Ware and to Professor Hedge. The house on the corner of Quincy Street, later occupied by Dr. A. P. Peabody and now by Professor Palmer, was built in 1811, and was occupied at first by members of the family of Judge Dana. On the opposite side of the main
THE PEABODY MUSEUM
formed; and in 1829, came the division of the First Church itself. The more conservative part of the congregation, being a minority of the Parish but a majority of the Church, with- drew and organized the Shepard Congrega- tional Society, of which Dr. Holmes became the minister. The First Parish settled Rev. William Newell, and, in 1833, built a new meet- ing-house which is still standing opposite the College gate. The old house was removed, and the site included in the College Yard.
Next the old meeting-house, in the time of which Lowell and Higginson wrote, near the
street still stood the Bishop's Palace and the Phips-Winthrop House. Owen's University Book Store was on the corner of Holyoke Street.
In the College Yard, the second and present Stoughton Hall had been built in 1804, and Holworthy Hall, in 1812. University Hall, called at the time the "handsomest building in the State," had been built in 1815-its archi- tect being the famous Charles Bulfinch. In its basement was the College Kitchen. The ground floor had two dining-rooms, one used by seniors and sophomores, the other by freshmen and juniors. In the second and third stories was
100
A HISTORY OF CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
the College Chapel, with seats on one side for the seniors and sophomores, and on the other for juniors and freshmen, and with different entrance doors, "so that there might be no hostile collision on the stairs," says Dr. Peabody. "In front of the pulpit was a stage for public declamations and exhibitions, and on each side of it a raised sentry-box, occupied at daily prayers by a professor or tutor on the watch for misdemeanors. Opposite the pulpit was the organ with a double row of raised seats on each side-one for the choir, the other for parietal officers and graduates. There were
lower story were the philosophical and physical chamber and apparatus, and the mineralogical cabinet. Holden Chapel, then divided into two stories, contained in its lower floor the chemical laboratory and lecture-room, and above, a lecture-room.
"In my time," wrote Dr. Peabody, who graduated in 1826, "a student's room was remarkable chiefly for what it did not have,- for the absence of all appliances of elegance and comfort, I might almost say, of all tokens of civilization. The feather-bed-mattresses not having come into general use-was regarded
GORE LIBRARY (THE COLLEGE LIBRARY)
two side galleries for families of the professors." In the second story, at the southern end, were two rooms for the use of the Corporation; and at the northern end and in the third story, were six recitation rooms. Originally there was a roofed piazza on the front of the building, which was later removed to check the "grouping" of students, then a penal offence.
The older buildings, Massachusetts and Hollis Halls, were dormitories, having thirty- two rooms each, the lower floors being reserved for freshmen. Harvard Hall contained the College Library in its second story; and in the
as a valuable chattel; but ten dollars would have been a fair auction-price for all the other contents of an average room, which were a pine bedstead, washstand, table and desk, a cheap rocking-chair, and from two to four other chairs of the plainest fashion, the bed furnishing seats when more were needed. I doubt whether any fellow-student of mine owned a carpet. A second-hand furniture dealer had a few defaced and threadbare carpets, which he leased at an extravagant price to certain Southern members of the senior class; but even Southerners, though reputed to be fabulously rich, did not aspire to
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.