USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge > History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630-1913 > Part 7
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mainly of the territory then called Shawshin. which carried the northern boundary nearly to the Merrimac. At this period of its greatest size the town thus extended in a curiously irregular line, more than thirty miles in length, from a point several miles to the south of the Charles, almost to the Merrimac, and included the greater part, if not the whole, of Brighton, Newton, Cambridge, Arlington, Lexington, Bedford, Billerica and portions of Belmont and Winchester. It should be remembered that the land near Mount Auburn at this time belonged to Watertown, and that where East Cambridge and Cambridgeport now are, was then an uninhabited region of marsh, meadow and tangled forest growth. On May 29, 1655, with the consent of Cambridge, the Shawshin grant became the township of Billerica. On August 27, 1679, Cambridge Village, as it was called, was organized as a separate town, which later received the name of Newton, and on March 20, 1713, "Cambridge Farms" was set off and organized as Lexington. Little Cambridge and Menotomy (Brighton and Arlington) remained a part of the town for nearly another century.
The records of the town and of the selectmen of Cambridge from 1630 to 1703 have been carefully collected and printed, and graphic- ally illustrate the diligence of the local admin- istrators. The chief business in the early years was the allotment of land to the inhabi- tants, and as the land was taken up the records abound in votes about the care of the sheep and cattle, the cutting of timber on the com- mon, the adjustment of disputes about bound- aries, the surveying of lots and farms, and the ordering of the highways. The great events of the village history find due mention, the building of the new meeting-house in 1649, and of the parsonage in 1669, the successive settlement of the ministers of the town, and the building of the "Great Bridge," in 1660- 1664. This latter undertaking was no small
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enterprise. A causeway had to be constructed across the marsh at the foot of what is now Boylston Street, and a bridge built which would stand the crush of the ice as it moved up and down the river with the tides. The cost of the undertaking fell heavily on the settlement, but citizens of neighboring towns helped with private subscriptions, and the General Court later required the other towns of Middlesex County that used the bridge as much as Cambridge to contribute to the cost of maintenance.
The Cambridge settlers, like all the New England people, were remarkably homogene- ous in race and in spirit. They were of pure English stock. Their traditions, their religi- ous convictions, their ideas about forms of government and the administration of justice were practically identical. There were very few social distinctions. Some of the pioneers had been in England substantial country gentlemen and others had been merchants of considerable means, but in New England there were no large landed estates and there was nolaw of entail. The magistrates, who were generally chosen from the most respected families, and on account of their own worth, were held in a certain honor. The military offices in the several towns were also posts of honor and the regular days for military drill were occasions of importance. It was also the custom to allot the seats of the congregation in the meeting-house with regard to the dignity of its members, an order of precedence which was carefully determined. Nevertheless, as in all pioneer communities, all the people labored, debated and worshipped together. Trial by jury was early established in the Massachu- setts Colony. There were town courts and county courts, and above them the Court of Assistants, and the General Court, to which appeal might be carried in important cases. The decision of the magistrates was final. There was never any recognition of the control of the common law of England, and any effort to take appeals to an English court or king was sure to fail.
The military force of the Massachusetts Colony was a militia in which all the men between the ages of sixteen and sixty were enrolled. They were required to furnish their
own arms, which consisted of pikes, muskets and swords. The muskets had matchlocks or flintlocks, and to each one there was "a pair of bandoleers, or pouches, for powder and bullets," and a stick called a rest, for use in taking aim. The pikes were ten feet in length, besides the spear at the end. For defensive armor corselets were worn, and coats quilted with cotton.
The unit of the militia was the train-band of each town, consisting usually of from fifty to two hundred men. The commissioned officers of each train-band were a captain, a lieutenant and an ensign. Company trainings took place, at first, every Saturday; and later once a month. They were begun and closed with prayer. The only martial music was that of the drum. In 1644 Massachusetts had twenty- six train-bands, and "a very gallant horse troop." The companies were gathered into regiments, which generally represented a county. There was, thus, a Suffolk, a Middle- sex and an Essex regiment. Over the whole force of the Colony was a major-general, sub- ordinate only to the governor.
Cambridge citizens had a very active part in all these military matters. Thomas Dudley was the first major-general, John Haynes was the colonel of the Middlesex regiment, and Roger Harlakenden the lieutenant-colonel. The Cambridge train-band was commanded by George Cooke, afterwards one of Cromwell's colonels, and its ensign was Samuel Shepard who also later served as a major in the Parlia- mentary army. Joseph Cooke succeeded his brother as captain, but was soon relieved by Daniel Gookin, who retained the office for forty years, rising meanwhile to the command of all the Middlesex militia, and in 1681 to be major-general.
Houses of public entertainment were natur- ally established early in the Massachusetts towns, but great caution was taken in the licensing of "grave and responsible citizens." On September 8, 1636, Thomas Chesholm, deacon of the First Church, got a license to "keep a house of entertainment at Newtown," and four years later he was licensed "to draw wine at Cambridge." His tavern stood on Dunster Street, just back of the meeting- house, and he apparently kept it until his
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death in 1671. Meanwhile, another deacon of the church, Nathaniel Sparhawk, was "permitted to draw wine and strong water in Cambridge." His house was on the easterly side of Boylston Street, one-half way between Harvard Square and Mt. Auburn Street. In 1652 we find the first record of the famous Blue Anchor Tavern. In that year "the townsmen granted liberty to Andrew Belcher to sell beer and provide entertainment for strangers," and two years later the County Court granted him a license "to keep a house of public entertainment at Cambridge." Mr. Belcher was a highly-respected man. His son, Andrew Belcher, Jr., became a member of the Provincial Council, and his grandson, Jonathan Belcher, became governor of Massa- chusetts. The sign of the Blue Anchor was displayed on the northeast corner of Boylston and Mt. Auburn Streets, and the Belcher family continued to be innholders until 1705. The building continued to be a tavern up to 1737, when the sign of the Blue Anchor was transferred across the street and there con- tinued for nearly a century.
It is not difficult to reconstruct a rough picture of the Cambridge of the last half of the seventeenth century. The original log- houses were gradually replaced by substantial two-story dwellings. These houses were closely grouped together in the settled part of the town, and eastward and northward stretched the cultivated lands, diversified by the marshes and gently sloping hills. Most of the houses were reasonably commodious. The lower floor, as a rule, contained a hall, a living-room and a kitchen, and the upper story, four chambers. The furniture was mostly home- made, for it was almost impossible to import in the small sailing vessels of the time, any considerable amount of household furniture from England. Furniture, with the exception of beds and mattresses, is seldom mentioned as an asset in the wills of the period, showing that it must have been of small value. A good many families had silver heirlooms, which were transmitted from generation to genera- tion. Of musical instruments there is no trace whatever.
The chief house of the town was still that originally built by Governor Dudley, the house
that Winthrop censured because its interior panelling and general finish were "too fine for the wilderness." It stood at what is now the corner of Dunster and South Streets, on the first rise of land above the salt marshes that bordered the river. When Dudley removed to Ipswich his Cambridge estate was purchased by Roger Harlakenden who was the chief layman of Cambridge until his untimely death in 1638, at the age of twenty-seven. He was selectman, an assistant, and lieutenant- colonel of the Middlesex regiment. His children went back to England with their stepfather in 1649. Harlakenden's widow married Herbert Pelham, who came to Cambridge a widower in 1638. He was an English country gentleman of good family and substantial means who at once took a place of leadership in the community and Colony. He took up his residence in the Dudley-Harlakenden house, and soon became the largest landed proprietor in Cambridge. He cleared and developed large farms south of the river, on the Harlakenden property in Lexington and Bedford, and on the rising ground, long known as Pelham's Island, in what is now the most thickly-settled part of Cambridgeport. He was successively select- man, assistant and commissioner of the United Colonies, and he was the first treasurer of Harvard College. In 1649 he returned to England with his family, became a member of Parliament, and there rendered frequent and important services to Massachusetts and the sister colonies. Mr. Pelham not only owned the Dudley homestead, but also the house originally built by Simon Bradstreet, which stood on the east side of Boylston Street, near Harvard Square.
The next most important houses in the village were those originally built by Governor Haynes and by Thomas Hooker. These were occupied after their departure respectively by President Dunster of the College, and by the minister, Thomas Shepard, who married Hooker's daughter. The Haynes-Dunster house stood on the west side of the market- place, which is now Winthrop Square, and the Hooker-Shepard house stood next the college building about where Boylston Hall now stands in the College Yard.
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Joseph Cooke, who ran the ferry at the foot of Dunster Street, had an estate of some five acres on the eastern side of Holyoke Street below Mt. Auburn Street, and was a large land owner in other parts of the town. He was for many years selectman, town clerk for five years and representative for six years. He returned to England in 1658, but his descendants are numerous in the community. It is noticeable that Mr. Cooke and his brother, George Cooke, who came over with Thomas Shepard and Roger Harlakenden in 1635, were, in the list of the ship's company, called "ser- vants to Mr. Harlakenden," but this was evidently a disguise to get them safely out of England. Both the brothers were among the foremost of the Cambridge settlers, and were evidently men of comparative wealth. George Cooke besides being selectman, deputy, speaker of the house and commissioner of the United Colonies, was conspicuous in military affairs. He was the first captain of the Cambridge train-band, and later captain of the artillery. He lived at the other end of the village from his brother Joseph, his estate extending along the northern side of what is now Eliot Street. In 1645, George Cooke returned to England, became a colonel in Cromwell's army, and was killed in battle in Ireland, in 1652.
Another serviceable citizen was Edward Goffe, who also came over with Shepard and Harlakenden and broke out of the wilderness a large farm at the extreme eastern edge of the village. His land stretched from Shepard's house, next the college building, eastward to Dana Hill, and he built his dwelling about at the corner of Quincy and Harvard Streets. He was a magistrate, a representative, for sixteen years a selectman, and he apparently paid a larger tax than any Cambridge man except Mr. Pelham. His descendants were prominent in town affairs until the revolution.
Among the other Cambridge families of the earliest generation, two are deserving of special remembrance. Edmund Angier was one of the earliest settlers, and built, in 1636, a dwell- ing opposite the meeting-house, or on the northwest corner of Dunster and Mt. Auburn Streets. He soon began to keep what we should now call a general or variety store, on
the corner diagonally across from the home- stead. Dunster Street, with the ferry at its foot, was thus the main street of the village. When the visitor landed at the ferry and climbed the sloping bank of the river he came first to the mansion of Mr. Pelham, the only citizen whose name always had "Esquire" written after it. Then on the left, he came to Deacon Chesholm's inn, and then to the meeting-house, with Angier's store facing it across Dunster Street, and Angier's house across Mt. Auburn Street, or as it was then called, Spring Street. There were three dwell- ings on the eastern side between the Angier house and the "Printery," at the corner of Dunster Street and Harvard Square. Turn- ing there a little to the right, the visitor would come to the college building and the house of Rev. Thomas Shepard.
The mention of the "Printery" recalls the chief Cambridge industry of the earlier days and its fortunes. Stephen Day, his son Matthew Day, and his wife's son by a former marriage, William Boardman, came over together and set up the press on the Dunster Street corner. The younger Day did the printing, and after his death, in 1649, Samuel Green came to run the press and had charge of it for nearly fifty years. He lived in a house across Dunster Street from the press, and about where Holyoke House now stands. Meanwhile William Boardman inherited the estate where the press was located, and later added to it the lot adjoining it on the west, so that he owned the whole frontage of Harvard Square between Dunster and Boylston Streets. Mr. Boardman was early made steward of Harvard College and retained that office till his death in 1685. He was succeeded succes- sively by his sons Andrew and Aaron, and by his grandson and great grandson, who bore the name of Andrew, making four generations of one family who thus served the College for a period covering a whole century. The second Andrew kept a store on Harvard Square, was for thirty-one years town clerk, for forty-six years town treasurer, and for eighteen years selectman. The third Andrew did not long retain the stewardship of the College, but he succeeded his father as town clerk, an office he held for thirty-nine years, and as town treas-
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urer, where he served twenty-three years. He was for twenty-two years the town's repre- sentative in the General Court, and for seven- teen years a judge of the Court of Common Pleas.
If it is not difficult to reconstruct in imagina- tion the outward appearance of Cambridge in the colonial period, neither is it hard to imagine the daily habit of the people. It was a life of steady hard work and of no little variety of employment. In the first place all the people worked at breaking and culti- vating the land. The soil was not rich, but it was productive. The settler found that his patch of land would produce Indian corn year after year in undiminished quantities. A patch of three acres worked chiefly with the hoe and manured with the small fish that abounded in the streams and creeks, would yield enough for the yearly maintenance of a family. The Indian corn was both hardy and nutritious and the planters soon reconciled themselves to it as a substitute for wheat, to which the soil and temperature were less pro- pitious. The native grasses were coarse, but it took only a few seasons to cover the open lands with a growth of hay from imported seed. Barley, rye, oats and pease were suc- cessfully cultivated, and most of the garden fruits and vegetables common in the mother country. Squashes, pumpkins and beans were indigenous to the soil. The apple, the pear, the cherry, the plum, and the quince were found to take kindly to their new home. Poultry and swine could be fed at little cost, and so multiplied in great abundance, and as pasturage was extended and improved, goats in the first place, and then sheep, horses and cattle became numerous. Between 1635 and 1640 cattle breeding was the most lucrative form of trade in Massachusetts, with the single exception of fishing. The increase of tillage caused a regular demand for oxen, and there was a brisk export trade in cattle with the West Indies. Sheep did not do so well, and the General Court, in 1654, found it necessary ' to forbid the exportation of sheep and the killing of lambs. There was abundant pastur- age, and horse-breeding was profitable. It is impossible to discover just when wheel carriages began to be used, but the condition
of the roads was so rough that during the first quarter century it is probable that all communi- cation was either by boat or on horseback.
The townspeople, as in most pioneer com- munities, were obliged to practice all trades. A citizen of Cambridge lived mainly upon the product of his land, but his house and most of his belongings were the work of his own hand. He was farmer, carpenter, blacksmith, shoe- maker and trader, all in one. Cambridge was too far from the sea to have any large part in the chief industry of the Colony,-fishing,- but the bank of the river was a convenient place for ship-building, and several small vessels, "shallops" and "ketches," were early constructed and launched at the mouth of the creek.
There was very little currency in the Colony, and an early enactment of the General Court provided that corn should be legal tender. Taxes were received in corn, rated at six shil- lings a bushel. A certain amount of trade with the Indians gave a fictitious value to wampum and this was legal tender in Massa- chusetts for many years, up to the value of ten pounds. In 1652, Massachusetts estab- lished a mint of its own and coined silver in shilling, six pence and three pence pieces.
Manufactures of necessary articles were early undertaken with some success. The spinning and knitting of thread and yarn by the women at their homes was followed by the weaving of woolen and cotton fabrics, intro- duced by a few families who came from York- shire and built up a town at Rowley, adjoining Ipswich. The great demand for salt was promptly and profitably met, so easy was the process of obtaining it from sea-water. From the beginning of the settlements there was ample employment and good pay for the brick- maker, the mason, the carpenter, the tanner, the currier, the cordwainer, the sawyer and the smith.
The woods were a source of wealth. Boards, clapboards, shingles and staves and hoops for barrels, cost nothing but labor, and com- manded a ready sale. The pine forests yielded turpentine, pitch and tar. Furs obtained from the Indians by barter for provisions and for articles of European manufacture, were yet another resource for the export trade.
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In matters of dress the statute book shows that the magistrates tried to make the outward man conform to the serious purpose of the community. Seeking first the kingdom of God, they took to heart the injunction not to have much concern for the body what it should put on. They passed laws forbidding extremes of fashion and undue luxury in dress. They remonstrated against the superfluities which tended "to little use or benefit, but to the nourishment of pride and exhausting of men's estate and also of evil example to others." The dress of the majority of the people must needs have been plain, for the supply of home- spun woollen cloth and "linen fustian dimities" was not abundant, and we read that use was commonly made of "cordovan, deer, seal and moose skins."
The necessity for keeping the flocks of sheep for wool, and of preserving cattle for draught and for milk, restricted the use of meat, and there is no record of a butcher's shop in Cambridge until well along in the century. Game and fish at first supplied, to a consider- able extent, the want of animal food, and later chickens and pigs multiplied. In the earliest time, wheaten bread was not so uncommon as it afterwards became; but various prepara- tions of Indian corn soon came into use. Brown bread, a mixture of two parts of the meal of this grain with one part of rye, long continued to be the bread of the great body of the people. Hasty pudding, consisting of the boiled meal of this grain or of rye, and eaten with molasses and milk, was a common article of diet. Succotash, composed of beans boiled with Indian corn in milk, was a dish adopted from the Indians, as were other prepa- rations of corn, named samp and hominy. Indian corn meal, boiled or baked, and sweet- ened with molasses, as soon as molasses began to come from the West Indies, was Indian pudding in its primitive condition. The dish called baked beans commemorates the time when it was worth while to make the most of the commonest vegetable, by flavoring it with the flesh of the commonest animal. For considerably more than a century the people of Cambridge, ignorant of tea and coffee, lived chiefly on boiled Indian meal and milk, or on porridge or broth, made of pease or beans, and
seasoned by being boiled with salted beef or pork. The regular dinner on Saturdays (not on Friday, which would have been Popish) was salt codfish. Beer, which was brewed in the household, was accounted scarcely less than a necessary of life, and the orchards soon yielded an ample provision of cider.
The interest of the New England people in education was a marked characteristic from the earliest days. Schools were at once set up in all the considerable towns, and in 1647, the law of Massachusetts required that a school should be supported in every town having fifty householders, and that a grammar school should be established where a boy could be fitted for Harvard College in every place where the householders numbered one hundred. At Cambridge the school was kept by Mr. Elijah Corlet. Our first notice of it is contained in the tract already quoted, "New England's First Fruits," printed in England in 1643. There we read after the description of the College, that there is "by the side of the Colledge a faire Grammar Schoole, for the training up of young scholars, and fitting of them for Academical Learning, that still as they are judged ripe, they may be received into the Colledge. Master Corlet is the Mr. who has very well approved himselfe for his abilities, dexterity and painfulnesse in teaching." The school-house stood on a lot opposite the college building, and on the westerly side of Holyoke Street. It was apparently built not by the town, but by the public spirit of President Dunster and Mr. Edward Goffe. This house lasted until 1669, when it was taken down and the foundation stones used for the cellar of the parsonage. The new school-house on the same lot served for thirty years more. Mr. Corlet, in spite of many difficulties and privations, persevered in his work for more than half a century until his death in 1678.
We have seen that the ministers exercised extraordinary influence in the Massachusetts communities. They were the leaders not only in the religious life of the community, but often in secular affairs as well. Many of them possessed some medical knowledge, and as there were but few trained physicians in the colonies, this was employed for the common good. There were practically no professional
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lawyers in Massachusetts, and the ministers were often consulted by the magistrates about the framing of the laws and the adjustment of disputes. They came also naturally to practically control the organization and man- agement of the schools of every grade. Yet the deference paid to them was self-respecting. The laymen understood their rights, and their constant participation in the proceedings of the town and church accustomed them to the exercise of an independent judgment. No charge is more baseless than that which repre- sents early New England as "priest-ridden." On the contrary, a jealous public sentiment expressly excluded the ministers from political office, and kept the ultimate control both of the churches and of the state in the hands of the General Court. It was the General Court, and not the ministers, that banished Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. It was the General Court, a body of laymen, that called the Cambridge Synod that gave definite written form to the church polity of New England.
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