USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge > History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630-1913 > Part 15
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
THE TOWN
101
this luxury till the senior year. Coal was just coming into use, and had hardly found its way into college. The students' rooms-several of the recitation rooms as well-were heated by open wood-fires. Almost every room had, too, among its transmittenda, a cannon-ball, supposed to have been derived from the arsenal, which on very cold days was heated to a red heat, and placed as a calorific radiant on a skillet, or on some extemporized metallic stand; while at other seasons it was often utilized by being rolled downstairs at such time as might most nearly bisect a proctor's night-sleep. Friction matches-according to Faraday the
tations, including the remaining half of the students. Then came breakfast, which, in the college commons, consisted solely of coffee, hot rolls and butter, except when the members of a mess had succeeded in pinning to the nether surface of the table, by a two-pronged fork, some slices of meat from the previous day's dinner. Between ten and twelve every student attended another recitation or a lecture. Dinner was at half-past twelve,-a meal not deficient in quantity, but by no means appetizing to those who had come from neat homes and well- ordered tables. There was another recitation in the afternoon, except on Saturday; then
Lt
UNIVERSITY HALL
most useful invention of our age-were not yet. Coals were carefully buried in ashes over night to start the morning fire; while in summer, as I have elsewhere said, the evening-lamp could be lighted only by the awkward, and often baffling, process of 'striking fire' with flint, steel, and tinder-box.
"The' student's life was hard. Morning prayers were in summer at six; in winter, about half an hour before sunrise in a bitterly cold chapel. Thence half of each class passed into the several recitation rooms in the same building (University Hall), and three-quarters of an hour later the bell rang for a second set of reci-
evening prayers at six, or in winter at early twilight; then the evening meal, plain as the breakfast, with tea instead of coffee, and cold bread, of the consistency of wool, for the hot rolls."
Across Harvard Square from the Meeting- house, and on the corner of Dunster Street, stood Willard's Hotel, where the public booked for places in the hourly stage for Boston-fare twenty-five cents-or for Cambridgeport-fare eighteen and three-quarters cents. "At nine and two o'clock, Morse, the stage-driver, drew up in the College Yard and performed upon a tin horn to notify us of his arrival. Those who
102
A HISTORY OF CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
went to Boston in the evening were generally forced to walk. It was possible, to be sure, to hire a chaise of Jeremy Reed, yet his horses were expensive animals, and he was very par- ticular in satisfying himself of the undoubted credit of those to whom he let them," wrote Josiah Quincy of the Class of 1821, in his "Figures of the Past," and Dr. Peabody speaks of "that dreary walk to Cambridge in dense darkness, with no lights on our way, except dim oil lamps at the toll-houses, over a road believed to be infested with footpads, but on which we neither met nor passed a human being between the bridge and the College Yard. In- deed ... the roads then were so lonely that we used to make up parties of four or five to at- tend meetings or lectures in Boston."
On the cor- ner of Boyls- ton Street stood Deacon Levi Farwell's country store. On the west side of Har- vard Square stood the old County Court House (on the present site of the Harvard Co-operative Society), a square, wooden building with a cupola, "where," as Lowell wrote, "Parsons once laid down the law, and Ames and Dexter showed their skill in the fence of argument. Times have changed, and manners, since Chief-Justice Dana (father of Richard the First and grandfather of Richard the Second) caused to be arrested for contempt of court, a butcher who had come in without a coat to witness the administration of his coun- try's laws, and who thus had his curiosity exem- plarily gratified. Times have changed since the cellar beneath it was tenanted by the twin brothers Snow. Oystermen were they indeed,
silent in their subterranean burrow, and taking the ebbs and flows of custom with vivalvian serenity. Careless of the months with an R in them, the maxim of Snow (for we knew them but as a unit) was 'When 'ysters are good, they are good; and when they ain't, they isn't.'" The old Court House, though abandoned for court purposes in 1816, when the Court moved to East Cambridge, continued to be used for town meetings until 1831.
North of the Court House, there was a garden, and then an old, two-story, wooden dwelling, with a gambrel roof, much after the style of Wadsworth house. It had been occupied by Professor Sam- uel Webber, who succeeded Dr. Willard as President of the College in 1806, at the time when he was Professor of Mathemat- ics and Natural Philosophy. Next to this was a long 22 structure called the Smith House; and on its site a little later, and farther back from the street, was a small one-story building which sheltered the College fire-engine.
OLD COURT HOUSE
About on the location of the present Church Street, was College House No. 1, a wooden three-story building with brick ends, long called by the students "Wiswall's Den." It contained twelve rooms, and these, together with the rooms in College House No. 2, were occupied by law students and undergraduates who could not get rooms in the Yard, and, says Dr. Peabody, "in great part by certain ancient resident gradu- ates who had become waterlogged on their life voyage, by preachers who could not find willing listeners, by men lingering on the threshold of professions for which they had neither the
103
THE TOWN
courage nor capacity." Next the graveyard (where the First Parish Church now stands) was the Manning House; and next the Deacon Kidder House, both owned and rented by the College, and both torn down when the church was built in 1833.
In the middle of what is now Harvard Square stood the town pump and scales, and the market- house, a small square one-story building, which was removed about 1830. Great elms lined both sides of the Square. In the middle of the Square stood also that old milestone, long located, after 1830, in front of Dane Hall, and now in the old graveyard, bearing the apparently lying legend, "8 miles to Boston A.D. 1737." It is hard to remember that the road to Boston, prior to 1793, was over the Boylston Street Bridge, through Brookline to Roxbury, and over the Neck up Washington Street to the old State House on State Street.
West of Brattle Square (where Brattle Hall now is) was the town spring, and a good-sized pond with an island, and the handsome grounds of the Brattle place which extended to the river. In the 50's the pond was filled up; and a large, square, ugly hotel, known as the Brattle House, was built on its site, later purchased by the Law School for a dormitory, and still later sold to John Wilson's University Press.
Walking out Brattle Street, where once "the red-coated, rapiered figures of Vassall, Lech- mere, Oliver and Brattle creaked up and down on red-heeled shoes, lifting the ceremonious, three-cornered hat, and offering the fugacious hospitalities of the snuff-box," one passed the old Tory mansions standing in unchanged dignity. The Henry Vassal house was occupied by Bossenger Foster, the brother-in-law of Andrew Craigie, and from his heirs Mr. Samuel Batchelder bought it in 1841. The John Vassall house, after a brief occupancy by Mr. Nathanael Tracy, became the home of Mr. Craigie. Like so many of the promoters of the new villages of Cambridgeport and East Cambridge, Mr. Craigie fell on evil days and became seriously embarrassed. He had to part with all but some eight acres of the estate, and it is said for seven years before his death, in 1821, that he never came out of his house except on Sundays, for fear'of arrest. Mrs. Craigie let rooms in the famous old house to Harvard students, among
them Edward Everett and Jared Sparks, and later to the young professor, Henry W. Long- fellow. It is related that one day Mr. Long- fellow found Mrs. Craigie sitting by an open window through which innumerable canker- worms were crawling and festooning themselves on her dress and turban. Longfellow offered to remove or destroy the invaders but was met with the rebuke, "Young man, have not our fellow-worms as good a right to live as we?"
Beyond, in the Fayerweather house, lived Mr. William Wells, who kept there a school which had a wide-spread influence and reputa- tion. Mr. Wells had been a publisher and bookseller in Boston, and was the author of various useful Latin text-books. In 1826, his store and stock were destroyed by fire at a time when the insurance had just expired. During his business career he had never ceased to carry on the classical teaching which he had begun as a tutor in the College. He bought the Fayerweather house and opened a school, first for boys, and later for girls. After his active days were over, Mr. Wells continued to live, until his death in 1860, in the family of his daughter, who was the wife of Rev. William Newell, the beloved minister of the First Parish Church, and from whose children the fine old house was bought by its present owners.
At the end of the old Tory Row, in the Oliver mansion, lived the most distinguished citizen of Cambridge. Elbridge Gerry, the Vice- President of the United States, bought Elm- wood and the adjoining Thatcher farm in 1793. Mr. Gerry was a Democrat living in a Federalist stronghold at a time of hot political feeling, but, whatever may have been the political differences, there is no evidence that the Cam- bridge people treated their fellow-citizen with anything but the respect due to his office. Dr. Charles Lowell, the beloved and honored minis- ter of the West Church in Boston, bought Elm- wood in 1817, and there, in 1819, his son, James Russell Lowell, was born.
Returning toward the Common one passed at the corner of Mason and Garden Streets where the Shepard Congregational Church now stands, the house of Deacon Moore, and opposite, in the house which is now the Fay House of Radcliff College, lived Joseph Mckean,
104
A HISTORY OF CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, and five years later, in 1822, Edward Everett. In the northwest room of that house, in 1836, Rev. Samuel Gilman, of Charleston, while a guest at the celebration of the two hundredth anniver- sary of the College, wrote "Fair Harvard." On the north side of the Common, on what is now Waterhouse Street, lived William Ware, the author of "Zenobia," and the famous physician, Dr. Waterhouse. He was the first American physician to practise inoculation for small-pox. Lowell's graphic pen pictures him for us as he walked abroad with his "queue slender and tapering, like the tail of a violet crab, held out horizontally by the high collar of his shepherd's- gray overcoat, whose style was of the latest when he studied at Leyden in his hot youth. The age of cheap clothes sees no more of those faithful old garments, as proper to their wearers, and as distinctive as the barks of trees, and by long use interpenetrated with their very nature. ... The great collar disallowing any inde- pendent rotation of the head, I remember he used to turn his whole person in order to bring the foci of his great spectacles to bear upon any object. One can fancy that terrified Nature would have yielded up her secrets at once, with- out cross-examination, at their first glare. Through them he had gazed fondly into the great mare's-nest of Junius, publishing his observations upon the eggs found therein in a tall octavo. It was he who introduced vaccina- tion to this Western World. Malicious persons disputing his claim to this distinction, he pub- lished this advertisement: 'Lost, a gold snuff- box, with the inscription, "The Jenner of the Old World to the Jenner of the New." Who- ever shall return the same to Dr. Waterhouse shall be suitably rewarded.' It was never returned. Would the search after it have been as fruitless as that of the alchemist after his equally imaginary gold? Malicious persons persisted in believing the box as visionary as the claim it was meant to buttress with a sem- blance of reality. He used to stop and say good- morning kindly, and pat the shoulder of the blushing school-boy who now, with the fierce snowstorms wildering without, sits and remem- bers sadly those old meetings and partings in the June sunshine."
Crossing the bare, windswept Common, one
came, on Holmes Place, to four old houses. In one lived Cabel Gannett, who succeeded Mr. Hastings as the College Steward, and who had married Ruth Stiles, whose elder sister was the first wife of Dr. Abiel Holmes. There was born, in 1801, Ezra Stiles Gannett, afterwards for forty-seven years the minister of the Arlington Street Church, in Boston. The Hastings house, which had been General Ward's headquarters, came, in 1807, into the possession of Judge Oliver Wendell, and there his grandson, and the son of the Rev. Abiel Holmes, was born in 1809, and christened Oliver Wendell Holmes. The house may be taken as typical of the better houses of the village, and Dr. Holmes' descrip- tion of his birthplace is classical.
"The worst of a modern stylish mansion," he wrote, "is, that it has no place for ghosts. Now the old house had wainscots, behind which the mice were always scampering and squeaking and rattling down the plaster, and enacting family scenes and parlor theatricals. It had a cellar where the cold slug clung to the walls, and the misanthropie spider withdrew from the garish day; where the green mould loved to grow, and the long white potato-shoots went feeling along the floor, if haply they might find the daylight; it had great brick pillars, always in a cold sweat with holding up the burden they had been aching under day and night for a century and more; it had sepulchral arches closed by rough doors that hung on hinges rotten with rust, behind which doors, if there was not a heap of bones connected with a mys- terious disappearance of long ago, there well might have been, for it was the place to look for them. It had a garret, very nearly such a one as it seems to me one of us has described in one of his books; but let us look at this one as I can reproduce it from memory. It has a flooring of laths with ridges of mortar squeezed up between them, which if you tread on you will go to-the Lord have mercy on you! where will you go to? and the same being crossed by narrow bridges of boards, on which you may put your feet, but with fear and trembling. Above you and around you are beams and joists, on some of which you may see, when the light is let in, the marks of the conchoidal clip- pings of the broad-axe, showing the rude way in which the timber was shaped as it came, full
105
THE TOWN
of sap, from the neighboring forest. It is a realm of darkness and thick dust, and shroud- like cobwebs and dead things they wrap in their gray folds. For a garret is like a sea- shore, where wrecks are thrown up and slowly go to pieces. There is the cradle which the old man you just remember was rocked in; there is the ruin of the bedstead he died on; that ugly slanting contrivance used to be put under his pillow in the days when his breath came hard; there is his old chair with both arms gone, symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing earthly left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it out decently to the limbo of troublesome conveniences.
"The southeast chamber was the Library Hospital. Every scholar should have a book infirmary attached to his library. There should find a peaceable refuge the many books, invalids from their birth, which are sent 'with the best regards of the Author;' the respected but un- presentable cripples which have lost a cover; the odd volumes of honored sets which go mourning all their days for their lost brother; the school-books which have been so often the subjects of assault and battery, that they look as if the police court must know them by heart; these, and still more the pictured story-books, beginning with Mother Goose (which a dear old friend of mine has just been amusing his philosophic leisure with turning most ingen- iously and happily into the tongues of Virgil and Homer), will be precious mementos by and by, when children and grandchildren come along.
"Let us go down to the ground floor. I should have begun with this, but that the historical reminiscences of the old house have been recently told in a most interesting memoir by a distin- guished student of our local history. I retain my doubts about those 'dents' on the floor of the right-hand room, 'the study' of successive occupants, said to have been made by the butts of the Continental militia's firelocks, but this was the cause the story told me in childhood laid them to. That military consultations were held in that room, when the house was General Ward's headquarters, that the Provin-
cial generals and colonels and other men of war there planned the movement which ended in the fortifying of Bunker's Hill, that Warren slept in the house the night before the battle, that President Langdon went forth from the western door and prayed for God's blessing on the men just setting forth on their bloody ex- pedition,-all these things have been told, and perhaps none of them need be doubted.
"It was a great happiness to have been born in an old house haunted by such recollections, with harmless ghosts walking its corridors, with fields of waving grass and trees and singing birds, and that vast territory of four or five acres around it to give a child the sense that he was born to a noble principality."
Walking out what is now Kirkland Street, one passed the houses of what was known as "Professors' Row." First came the house of Stephen Higginson where, in 1823, his son, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was born. Stephen Higginson had succeeded Mr. Gannett as College Steward, and is described as a man who "was both before and after his time,- before it in the warmth of his sympathy and breadth of his ability; behind it, in the courtli- ness and refinement which belonged to the born aristocracy."
Beyond the Higginson house, and extending to the Charlestown line, were the one hundred and twenty acres of the Foxcroft estate on which stood the house of James Hayward, Professor of Mathematics; of Professor Asahel Stearns, the first teacher of law in the Harvard Law School; and of John Farrar, Professor of Natural Philosophy from 1807 to 1836. Professor Farrar was, wrote one of his students, "the most eloquent man to whom I ever listened. . . . His were the only exercises at which there was no need of a roll-call. No student was willingly absent." The last house in "Professors' Row" was that of Dr. Henry Ware, Hollis Professor of Divinity. Tradition declares that he was generally known by the students as "general scope," from the frequency with which that phrase recurred in his lectures. It is also alleged that the students were inclined to impugn his honesty, because in conversation and sermon he so often introduced a sentence by saying "I am not a-ware,"
Two remarkable people made their home at
106
A HISTORY OF CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
the other end of the town, but were intimately associated with the College circle. Margaret Fuller was a singular product of the Cambridge soil. Her father, Timothy Fuller, was one of the first to buy land in Cambridgeport, and established his homestead there. He was a member of Congress from 1817 to 1825. His famous daughter, Margaret, was born in Cam- bridgeport, in 1810-the first of a family of eight children. Her father took entire charge of her education, which was adapted to a precocious child, and Dr. Frederick H. Hedge wrote of her, that when she was thirteen years old she passed for a mature woman.
"She had," he said, "in conversation at that early age begun to dis- tinguish herself and made much the same impression in society that she did in after years." She wrote her own description of her life in Cambridge at the age of fifteen, which was probably not in accord- ance with the usual rule of Cambridge families. Her day was occupied as follows: she rose be- fore five, walked an hour, practised at the piano until seven, į breakfasted and read French at eight, read Brown's Philosophy (two or three lectures) until half-past nine, went to school and studied Greek until twelve, recited, went home and practised until two, read two hours in Italian, walked or rode and spent her evenings with music or friends. Certainly she ought to have been one of the learned women of her genera- tion. "In our evening reunions," said Dr. Hedge, "she was conspicuous by the brilliancy of her wit, which needed but little provocation to break forth in exuberant sallies, that drew around her a knot of listeners and made her the central attraction of the hour. Rarely did she enter a company in which she was not a promi- nent object. .
. . For some reason or other
MARGARET FULLER
she could never deliver herself in print as she did with her lips." Margaret Fuller left Cam- bridgeport when she was twenty-three years old, when her family removed to Groton. Her after career as a woman of letters and the friend and associate of Emerson, Channing and the Transcendentalists was that, as Colonel Hig- ginson said, of "a person whose career is more interesting than that of any other American of her sex; a woman whose aims were high and whose services great; one whose intellect was uncommon, whose activity was incessant, whose life varied and whose death dramatic."
The famous painter, Washington Allston, also lived in Cambridgeport. His pictures are still the proud possession of many an old New England family, and during his lifetime he was easily the most admired of American artists. A man with so genuine an artistic temperament and spirit, and with so rich a sense of form and color, was another curious product of the Puritan environment of Cam- bridge. "If," wrote Lowell, "it were surpris- ing that Allston should have become a painter at all, how almost mirac- ulous that he should have been a great and original one! I call him original deliberately, because, though his school be essen- tially Italian, it is of less consequence where a man buys his tools, than what use he makes of them. Enough English artists went to Italy and came back painting history in a very Anglo- Saxon manner, and creating a school as melo- dramatic as the French, without its perfection in technicalities. But Allston carried thither a nature open on the southern side, and brought it back so steeped in rich Italian sunshine that the east winds (whether physical or intellectual) of Boston, and the dusts of Cambridgeport as- sailed it in vain. To that bare wooden studio
107
THE TOWN
one might go to breathe Venetian air, and, better yet, the very spirit wherein the elder brothers of Art labored, etherealized by metaphysical specu- lation, and sublimed by religious fervor. The beautiful old man! Here was genius with no volcanic explosions (the mechanic result of vulgar gunpowder often), but lovely as a Lap- land night; here was fame, not sought after nor worn in any cheap French fashion as a ribbon at the button-hole, but so gentle, so retiring, that it seemed no more than an assured and embold- ened modesty; here was ambi- tion, undebased by rivalry and incapable of the side-long look; and all these massed and harmonized to- gether into a purity and depth of char- acter, into a tone, which made the daily life of the man the greatest masterpiece of the aritst."
Another Cambridge worthy of a very different type, but who well deserves remembrance, was Captain Nathanael F. Wyeth, the leader of a party of Cambridge young men who struck the Oregon trail in the spring of the year 1832. Wyeth and his two brothers, James and Jacob, and nearly a score of comrades, inspired by the tales of adventure among the Indians and the wild ·beasts of the far northwest, formed an emi- grant and hunting company with the purpose of going overland to the northwest coast. For their long and untried journey they built a curious conveyance, which one side up was a
WASHINGTON ALLSTON
wagon running on wheels, and when turned over was a boat to be propelled by oars. This odd vehicle was dubbed "The Amphibium," though the Cambridge boys, mindful of the peculiarities of the enthusiastic leader of the expedition, called it "The Natwyethum." In order to toughen themselves for the hardships of their journey, the adventurers, clad in uni- form and with broad belts which carried axe, knife and bayonet, went into camp for ten days on one of the islands in Boston harbor. Then they set out on their overland march, drag- ging the Am- phibium across the hills, and using it as a ferry for them- selves and their goods across the rivers. In fifty days they accomplished the march to St. Louis, and there they abandoned their curious vehicle and went on by steamer up the Missouri River to Indepen- dence. They were fortunate enough to fall in with some experienced guides and
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.