Cambridge City (part 5 of 12)

The besieging force which made its center at Cambridge was a heterogeneous gathering. The militia of the various provinces served under their own officers, but the different commanders speedily agreed to subordinate themselves to General Artemas Ward, as the head of the largest body of troops. He, however, had no organized staff and very inadequate means of communicating orders and receiving reports. If Gage had attacked he could have been opposed only by scattered regiments, and not by a united force.

The size of the army was variable and uncertain. On paper there were more than twenty thousand men; as a matter of fact there can seldom have been more than three quarters of that number. It was, further, an army of volunteers where every man owned his musket and cartridge box, clothed himself, and considered himself still, to a large extent, his own master. The men, who sprang to arms on the 19th of April, had not prepared themselves for a long campaign. They had left home on the run and in the next few days many of these men went back for the necessary arrangement of their affairs and for more clothing. The larger number of them returned to camp immediately, but others stayed away for a considerable time. Even those who joined the army after more preparation often had business that called them home, in which case they considered it a hardship to be denied, "especially when that business was haying." Nearly two months went by without any more active fighting than occasional skirmishes as foraging parties met, or when American detachments successfully carried off the sheep and stock from the islands in the harbor.

By the 16th of June the time had come for an aggressive move. The Committee of Safety, consulting with the more prominent officers, decided to occupy the heights of Charlestown. Ward issued the necessary orders and in the dusk of evening fifteen hundred men under command of Colonel William Prescott paraded opposite the western door of the Hastings House. From the door, in his academic gown, came President Langdon of the college, and the prayer he offered stirred the hearts of all who listened. What Prescott and his men did that night and the next day on Bimker Hill is written large in American history. Nathanael Greene was right when he said that the colonists were ready to sell King George another hill at the same price. To Cambridge the chief event of that momentous day was the loss of its military chief and first patriot citizen. Colonel Thomas Gardner. This able, zealous and courageous man had been the leader of the sentiment of the community throughout the years that foretokened the Revolution. He lived on the southern side of the river in what is now Allston. From 1769 until his death he was both selectman and the representative of Cambridge in the General Court and in the Provincial Congress. He served on both the local Committee of Correspondence and on the Provincial Committee of Safety. He had been the captain of the Cambridge Company and was promoted to be Colonel when General Brattle adhered to the loyalist side. His high character, his popularity, the military skill which he had already displayed, his patriotic ardor, all promised for him a most distinguished career. It is probable that, had he lived, he would have ranked among the most conspicuous of the patriot soldiers of the Revolution. He led his regiment to Bunker Hill and was just entering the engagement when he fell mortall}' wounded. He was borne back to Cambridge, where he lingered for two weeks and died on the 3d of July, just as Washington was crossing the Common to take command of the army.

The selection by the Continental Congress of a general-in-chief was an epoch-making act. John Hancock, the President of the Congress, was ambitious to secure this difficult and dangerous post, but John Adams was keen enough to perceive that the New England army could be knit together and its jealousies appeased only by the appointment of a general from another section. In militar}- experience and ability, in strength and purity of character, there was no American then living to be compared with George Washington of Virginia.

While others had been discussing and hesitating, Washington had long ago made up his mind that the quarrel with the king must come to violent disruption. At the second Continental Congress to which he was a delegate it was noticed that he attended the sittings in his uniform of a Virginia colonel. Though he took no part in the debates, he made himself felt, and his colleague, Patrick Henry, said of him: "If you speak of solid information and sound judgment. Colonel Washington is unquestionably the greatest man on the floor." Debate ran high, but finally the Congress adopted the militia at Cambridge as a "Continental Army," appointed four major-generals: Lee, Schuyler, Ward and Putnam, and eight brigadiers; and on the 15th of June, two days before the Bunker Hill battle, chose Washington to be the commander-in-chief.

Washington himself knew better than any man the consequences of the momentous step. On the 16th of June he accepted his commission, but added: "Lest some unlucky event should happen, unfavorable to my reputation, I beg it to be remembered by every gentleman in the room, that I, this day, declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the command I am honored with. As to pay. Sir, I beg leave to assure the Congress, that, as no pecuniary consideration could have tempted me to accept this arduous employment, at the expense of my domestic ease and happiness, I do not wish to make any profit from it. I will keep an exact account of my expenses. These, I doubt not, they will discharge; and that is all I desire."

On the 3d of July, a year and a day before the Declaration of Independence, Washington reached Cambridge and under the great elm still standing by the common, he took command of the army. He made his headquarters at first in the house of the president of the college (Wads worth House), but after a few weeks took possession of the beautiful mansion of Colonel Vassall. That house had always been the home of generous and gracious hospitality, an association which it has never lost. Washington brought with him to Cambridge the Virginia traditions of ample living. He was himself a plain soldier, and a man, besides, of remarkable self-restraint. His moderation was seen in his early and regular hours and in his simple diet, which was sometimes nothing, we are told, but baked apples or berries with milk. It was, however, his habit to gather about him, at his headquarters, the officers of the army and the prominent visitors who for public or personal reasons made their way to the Cambridge camp. In December he was joined by Mrs. Washington and the two had here their last experience of home life for many long years. They maintained at the Vassall house a style of living which comported with the General's position.

Almost all of the leaders of the Revolution who later won renown or shame were in Cambridge during the siege and constant visitors at headquarters. Hither from his vagrant wanderings over half the earth came Charles Lee, the second in command of the army. He was grotesque in appearance, satirical of speech and repulsive of countenance, but the people believed in his ability and sincerity until he had proved both his incompetency and treachery. He came to Cambridge heralded as a military prodigy, and though his insubordination brought his boastful career to an end long before the war was over, the blackness of his treason was not known until after he and those he had tried to betray had long been dead. That other conspicuous traitor, Benedict Arnold, was daily at the Vassall house before he started on his Quebec expedition. His ability and reckless courage commended him to Washington. Had he only been so fortunate as to fall in his desperate charge at Stillwater he would have ranked among the most valorous of our patriot heroes. Horatio Gates, the vain, weak man who later tried to push Washington from his command, was the Adjutant-General of the army at Cambridge, and in constant contact with his chief. The laurels he wore, but did not win, at Saratoga, faded

A History Of Cambridge, Massachusetts

How marked was the contrast between these vainglorious but treacherous soldiers and the honest virtues of comrades in arms like Heath and Thomas of Massachusetts, Sullivan and Stark of New Hampshire, Richard Gridley and Rufus Putnam, the engineers. At the Vassall house Washington first met those tried and true companions of all his after career, Nathanael Greene, Henry Knox and Benjamin Lincoln. Greene led the Rhode Island troops. He was Quaker bred, thoughtful, resourceful and judicious. He had none of the meretricious brilliancy of men like Lee and Arnold, but he was able, loyal and reliable, and became his chief's right arm. Knox was a Boston bookseller who made himself an expert artillerist and was later Washington's first Secretary of War. It was Knox who, with dauntless perseverance, in the depth of the New England winter, dragged to Cambridge the cannon captured at Ticonderoga, and so made possible the occupation of Dorchester Heights and the consequent evacuation of Boston. Two of those cannon now stand on Cambridge Common in front of the Soldiers' Monument. Benjamin Lincoln had been the secretary of the Massachusetts Provincial He was sound in judgment, in- and faithful. To him at Charleston it was given to win one of the noblest of achievements, the preservation in defeat of the respect and confidence of all good men. Twent}' years later, when Washington was asked to describe the characteristics of the then living officers who might be considered for commander-in-chief in case of war, it was to Lincoln that he gave the highest praise, saying that he was "sensible, brave and honest."

There were not lacking picturesque figures among the guests at headquarters. Israel Putnam was a better Indian fighter than he was disciplinarian, but his bluff, hearty ways and his resistless enthusiasm appealed to his men and he was easily the most popular leader in Cambridge. His manners and his vehement speech ma}'' not have always approved themselves at the General's table, but Washington Ifhe'w a inan when he saw him and gave to the Veteran" his respect and confidence. Daniel

Morgan, the stalwart Virginia wagoner, and his riflemen clad in fringed hunting shirts, lent a dramatic aspect to the camp, and Colonel Glover and his Marblehead fishermen had been at home at the Vassall house before it became the headquarters. Those same fishermen a few months later ferried the army over the East River after the disastrous battle on Long Island, and it was they who rowed and pushed through the floating ice in the Delaware the boats that bore Washington and his freezing regiments to the victory of Trenton.

But it was not only the soldiers who walked the broad pathway to the door of the Vassall house. Hither, too, came the public men of the Colony, the members of the Committee of Safety, and of the Provincial Congress sitting hard by in Watertown. The most noted company, however, that sat at Washington's table was when in October a committee of Congress, consisting of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Lynch of Carolina, and Colonel Harrison of Virginia, arrived to confer with the generals and with the New England leaders. We have a glimpse of a dinner party given to them, afforded by Dr. Belknap, who was a guest, and who wrote: "Lynch, Harrison, and Wales wished to see Boston in flames, but Lee told them it was impossible to bum it unless the}' sent men in with bundles of straw on their backs to do it." Dr. Franklin apparently took no part in the debate, but we can imagine that no visitor would attract more attention than this renowned man, who sat and listened to whether his native town should be destroyed. He was sixty-nine years old at this time, twentysix years older than the commanding general, and he was the most distinguished American then living. He had foreseen the impending conflict years before, and was able now to write to his friend Priestly in England, " Enough has happened, one would think, to convince your ministers that the Americans will fight, and that this is a harder nut to crack than they imagined."

There was plent}' of work to do inside and outside of headquarters. The raw militiamen were to be made into efficient soldiers. In the very face of the enemy an army had to be created and supplied, fortifications built, discipline enforced. "There is great overturning in camp," wrote the Reverend William Emerson. "New lords, new laws. The Generals Washington and Lee are upon the lines every day. New orders from his Excellency are read to the respective regiments every morning after prayers. The strictest government is taking place, and great distinction is made between officers and soldiers. Every one is made to know his place, and keep in it. . . . Thousands are at work every day from four till eleven o'clock in the morning."

Frye, Bridge, Sargeant and Woodbridge, and General Heath's brigade, consisting of his own regiment and those of Colonels Prescott, Patterson, Scammon, Gerrish and Phinney. The intrenchments began at the River at the foot of Putnam Avenue, or about where the Riverside Press now stands, and ran along the brow of Dana Hill until they connected with the redoubts on Prospect Hill in Somerville. Fort No. 1 was at the southern end of this line. Fort No. 2 was at what is now the corner of Putnam Avenue and Franklin Street.

fully planned. The right wing of the army under General Ward, with General Spencer, and the best of the Massachusetts brigadiers, John Thomas, blocked the neck of the Boston peninsula and held the Roxbury forts. The lines stretched from Brookline to Dorchester. The left wing under General Lee was intrenched on the Somerville hills and along the Mystic with its outposts far out to the east. His two brigades were led by Greene and Sullivan. The center at Cambridge was commanded by General Putnam with his own brigade, consisting of the regiments of Colonels Glover,

Fort No. 3 was at Union Square in Somerville Roughly estimated, there were some 4,000 men on the Roxbury lines, 7,000 more on Prospect, Winter, Plowed and Cobble Hills and north of the Mystic, and about 6,000 on the Cambridge lines. Of these a thousand or more found what must have been very close quarters in the college buildings. Many were in rude shelters on the Common or along the line of the intrenchments, and the rest found shelter in the houses and bams of the village or in tents in the pastures between the college and the low crest of Dana Hill. Two small batteries, one at Captain's Island and one at the next angle of the river commanded the approach to Cambridge by water. The latter of these was long preserved by the Dana family, and in 1858 it was restored at the joint expense of the City and the State and named Fort Washington. It stands as an interesting memorial of the siege and a curious reminder of the time when the Charles River was navigable by war vessels.

Powder was fearfully scarce in the Cambridge camps. Very little of it was made in the colonies, and none at all in the neighborhood of Boston. More than once the army had but nine rounds to a man. On the twenty-fourth of August Washington wrote: "We have been in a terrible situation, occasioned by a mistake in a return: we reckoned upon three hundred quarter casks, and had but thirty-two barrels." Good muskets, too, were hard to get. The gunsmiths of Philadelphia, who had been expected speedily to equip the army, were not able to supply guns with any rapidity, and Washington had to pick them up, good, bad or indifferent, wherever he could.

The progress of the siege of Boston was thus evidently predetermined by other causes than the courage of the soldiers or the skill of the opposing generals. General Gage did not dare make an aggressive campaign and General Washington could not. General Howe, on assuming the command of the troops in Boston early in October, wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth: "The opening of a campaign from this quarter would be attended with great hazard, as well from the strength of the country as from the intrenched position which the rebels have taken, and from which they could not be forced without considerable loss on our part; and from the difficulty of access farther into the country they would have every advantage in the defence of it on their side, being indefatigable in raising field-works, which they judiciously suppose must wear us down by repeated onsets, whereas they are so numerous in this part of the country that they would not feel the loss they might sustain." These were very different \'iews from those expressed in a letter wn^tten by a British officer eight months before: "What you hear about the rebels taking up arms is merely bullying. Whenever it comes to blows, he that runs the fastest wiU think himself best of?. Believe me, any two regiments here ought to be decimated if they did not beat the whole force of Massachusetts Province." Hard experience had taught the British commanders the conviction that offensive operations in Massachusetts were hopeless. This alone accounts for the fact that ten thousand British soldiers, admirably equipped and led, permitted fifteen thousand raw militia, without artillery- or sufficient ammunition, to draw a net of intrenchments around them without making an effort to break through the toils.

On the other hand, it was impossible for Washington to make any assault. His soldiers were intelligent and full of faith in their cause ; but they were not so much soldiers as the material out of which soldiers should be made. The term of enlistment was so brief that the army was perpetually changing, and was never aU ready at one time. As Washington declared, never before had a siege like this been maintained, when one army had been disbanded and another recruited within musket-shot of the enemy. As for cannon, not until Knox, with incredible labor, had dragged them from the shores of Lake George, and Captain Manly had captured the transport Nancy, filled with the guns and ammunition which the Americans needed, could there be said to be any proper train of artiUerj'.

Meanwhile, impatient patriots all over the country were wondering and complaining that Boston was not stormed or the commanding points about the town occupied. Criticism of the commander-in-chief was severe in Congress and in the newspapers. " I cannot stand justified," wrote Washington, "without exposing my own weakness, and injuring the cause by exposing my wants. If I did not consult the public good more than my own tranquillity, I should long ere this have put everything on the cast of a die." Twice during the siege he proposed to a council of generals, to attempt to take the towTi by assault, - once in September by boats, and once in February over the ice - but his owti better judgment must have agreed with his officers that the feat was impossible. So, with the whole country full of great expectations, with his own impetu-

The chief event of the early winter was the discovery of the treason of Dr. Benjamin Church, formerly a leader of the Boston patriots and now the chief medical officer of the army, with his quarters at the Henrj^ Vassall house. From Newport there was brought by an American patriot to whom it had been given by a woman from Cambridge, a letter which he had been requested to deliver to some officer of a British man-of-war stationed in Narragansett Bay. The American had opened the letter, and found it to be in cipher. This was suspicious, and so he brought the letter to General Putnam who caused the woman to be arrested, and mounting her behind him on his horse, carried her to headquarters, where she named Dr. Church as the wTiter. The letter, when deciphered, proved to give information about the numbers and disposition of the American forces.

The army and country, as Washington wrote, were "exceedingly irritated" at this revelation of treachery in a trusted leader. Abigail Adams was probably right when she wrote, "If he is set at liberty, even after he has received a severe punishment, I do not think he will be safe." Church was brought before the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and allowed to defend himself. He did not deny the authorship of the letter, but insisted that he was writing to his brother, and that he meant no harm. He was not believed, and was expelled from the Congress and the army. Later the Continental Congress ordered him to be imprisoned. Released later, on account of his health, he was

As the winter passed, the pressing needs of the army were gradually supplied. "Officers" wrote the historian of the siege, "were slowly learning their duty; discipline was growing more firm and stead3% and the whole army was settling down into the habits of military life. Every hill and projecting point from the Mystic River to Dorchester Neck had been made impregnable, stretching around Boston in a vast semicircle of redoubts and breastworks of fifteen or twenty miles in length, until at last - Knox's precious convoy of cannon and mortar arrived, the almost priceless stores of Manly's fortunate capture transported to camp, and a moderate supply of powder gathered up - the decisive move was made." The first step was to plant a battery on Lechmere's Point (East Cambridge). This was accomplished by General Heath under a heavy cannonade. Guns were planted which not only commanded the shipping in the river, but which threw their shells into Boston. "Then one moonlight, hazy night in March, while all along the line the artillery thundered to drown the noise of the movement, three thousand men, and three hundred ox-carts laden with bales of pressed hay, quietly stole across Dorchester Neck, and climbed the heights. All night, while the enemy slept, the men labored. General Howe woke to find the town, the harbor, the fleet, commanded by his adversary's guns." A few futile plans of attack, a few days of uncertainty, and then the hurried embarkation of the British and the siege was over. On the 17th of March the Americans marched in over the Neck and others, crossing by boats from Cambridge, landed at the foot of the Common.

The Town

TH E tides of war ebbed away from Cambridge. The college teachers and students who had continued their work, first at Andover and then at Concord, returned. There was a great cleaning out of the college buildings and of the village houses so long occupied by the soldiers. The community did not, however, at once settle down into the old ways, for practically all the men of the town who were of mihtary age were serving at one time or another in the Revolutionary army. Their leader was Captain Samuel Thatcher, who lived on the farm which had been tilled by three generations of his family, at what is now the comer of Mt. Auburn Street and Coolidge Avenue, and who succeeded Colonel Gardner in the command of the regiment in which most of the Cambridge men were enlisted. After the war Colonel Thatcher sold his farm and lived for the remainder of his life at the eastern corner of Mt. Auburn and Boylston Streets. He was selectman and representative, and a useful citizen. His son, Samuel, married the daughter of General Knox and went to Maine. He was a member of Congress and Uved to be ninety-six years old, being at the time of his death the oldest graduate of Harvard. Another noteworthy Revolutionary officer was Dr. Abraham Watson, Jr., the surgeon of Colonel Thatcher's regiment. He came of a family that had Uved for four generations on a farm in North Cambridge, covering all the region from about where the railroad now runs northerly to Spruce Street. After the war Dr. Watson went to live in Littleton. His father was a tanner as well as a farmer, and began the tanning business which was long continued in North Cambridge. Many of the Watson stock were tanners, curriers, cordwainers, or followed other branches of the leather business.

five Cutters, four Danas, seven Frosts, three Hastingses, five Prentices, three Reads, three Russells, and foiu" Whittemores. These are all family stocks that are well represented in Cambridge today. The Boardmans, Cooks, Danas and Hastingses have already been mentioned. The Adamses were one of the leading families in Menotomy. The Barretts were mechanics and lived on the east side of Dunster Street. The Champneys Hved on the south side of the river where they had long been large landholders. The Coolidges were primarily a Watertown family, but a good many of them lived then, as now, within the boundaries of Cambridge. The Cutters were a very numerous clan, centering about Cutters Mill in Menotomy. On the gravestone of John Cutter, who was a farmer and deacon of the Menotomy Church, and died in 1776, it is recorded that he was survived bj' eight children, sixty-eight grandchildren, and one hundred and fifteen great-grandchildren. The Frosts were another very large family. The homestead was on the Charlestown road, which is now Kirkland Street, but different branches of the family had spread to North Cambridge and Menotomy. At the time of the Revolution the chief man of the family was Gideon Frost, the blacksmith and deacon of the Cambridge Church, who lived in the old house which is still standing on Linnaean Street. The Prentices were even more numerous in Cambridge than the Cutters. The original homestead was on the eastern side of the Common, about where the Methodist Church now stands, and that place long remained in the family. Spreading from that homestead some of the Prentices established themselves on the Menotomy road, just above the present railroad bridge, others built on the westerly side of the Common, along what is now Mason Street; another branch took root in a farm adjoining the Oliver and the Thatcher places, or about at the jtmction of Mt. Aubum Street and Elmwood Avenue. Still another group of Prentices acquired the lands on what is now Garden Street toward Fresh Pond, and developed the brickmaking business, which has been carried on in that section ever since. These Prentices built their houses on Garden Street, where the Botanic Garden now is, and on the slope of the observatory hill opposite. The Reads established themselves in Cambridge early in the eighteenth century, and for three generations dealt in leather. The homestead was on the south side of Brattle Street, between the estate of General Brattle and the Henry Vassall place. In the third generation the family spread into houses on the opposite side of Brattle Street. One of them is the house still standing at the comer of Brattle and Church Streets. In the fifth generation William Read acquired the large estate through which Appleton Street and Highland Street now run, and where the descendants of this serviceable family still live. The Russells were early settlers, for, in 1635, John Russell was living at the corner of Holyoke and Mt. Auburn Streets, and it was his son. Rev. John Russell, who was the protector of the Regicides in his parsonage at Hadley. In the later generations the Russells were chiefly identified with Menotomy and with Lexington, and we have seen how Jason Russell was killed on the 19th of April, 1775. The Whittemores were also chiefly connected with Menotomy and Lexington. The Whittemore farms were along Alewife Brook and the road that now runs from Winter Hill to Arlington. Captain Samuel Whittemore was the chief revolutionary representative of the family. He had been for sixteen years a selectman of Cambridge, and when the war broke out was nearly eighty years old. With the utmost enthusiasm he joined in the Lexington battle. He was desperately wounded and left for dead, but recovered and lived to be ninety-six, with living descendants to the fifth generation and numbering nearly two hundred. His nephew, another Samuel Whittemore, lived in Cambridge village on Boylston Street, and was for forty years deacon of the church. It shows the typically close connection of these old Cambridge families, when we read that the children of this Samuel Whittemore married respectively a Watson, an Angier, a Prentice and a Hastings.

A curious episode of the Revolutionary time was the occupation of Cambridge by the troops that surrendered with General Burgoyne at Saratoga on October 17, 1777. Cambridge was selected as the place of their detention. Fortunately the district was under the command of General Heath, and that efficient officer had sufficient notice to prepare for the coming of these unexpected visitors. The old barracks on the Somerville hills were put in order for the troops, and such quarters as could be obtained were provided for the officers in the Cambridge houses. General Burgoyne occupied the Borland house (the Bishop's Palace) and Baron Riedesel and his accomplished wife lived in the Lechmere-Sewall house, whence the Baroness wrote the charming letters and the journal which are the best original account of the northern campaign, and which contain pleasant descriptions of Cambridge and the life of the village. Burgoyne left Cambridge in April, 1778, but some of the prisoners stayed imtil November, when they departed to Virginia to complete a chapter of our military annals which is by no means creditable to American good faith.

The next visitors were of a very different kind. On September 1, 1779, there convened in the Cambridge meeting-house the delegates of all the Massachusetts towns who had gathered to frame a constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. All the patriot leaders, save those who were serving in the Continental Congress or in the army, were there. The Cambridge representatives were Abraham Watson, Benjamin Cooper and Stephen Dana. The Convention remained in session all winter, and finally adjourned in May, 1780. On May 20th, the Cambridge town meeting ratified the Constitution.

The next visitor was even more distinguished. On October 27, 1789, President Washington revisited the scenes of his first successes in command of the army, and was given an honorary degree by the College. Dr. Joseph Willard had succeeded President Langdon in 1781, and it fell to him to express in the meeting-house the greeting of the CoUege and the community. The style of his academic welcome was somewhat more elaborate than would suit the taste of a later day, -but it certainly lacked nothing

A History Of Cambridge, Massachusetts

"When you took the command of the troops of your country, you saw the University in a state of depression - its members dispersed - its Hteran,^ treasures removed - and the Muses fled from the din of arms then heard within its walls. Happily restored, in the course of a few months, by your glorious successes, to its former pri\-ileges, and to a state of tranquillity, it received its returning members, and oirr j'outh have since pursued without interruption their literarj' courses, and fitted themselves for usefulness in church and state. The public rooms, which j^ou formerly saw empty, are now replenished with the necessarv' means of improving the human mind in literature and science; and everj-thing within these walls wears the aspect of peace, so necessary to the cultivation of the liberal arts. While we exert ourselves, in our corporate capacity, to promote the great objects of this institution, we rest assured of your protection and patronage."

Washington's reply was in a similar though simpler style. He entreated the President and Fellows to be persuaded of the respectful and affectionate consideration with which he received his degree.

"Unacquainted," he said, "with the expression of sentiments which I do not feel, you will do me justice by believing confidently in my disposition to promote the interests of science and true religion.

"It gives me sincere satisfaction to learn the flourishing state of your literary republic - assured of its efficiency in the past events of oiu- political system, and of its further influence on those means which make the best support of good government, I rejoice that the direction of its measures is lodged with men whose approved knowledge, integrity and patriotism give an unquestionable assurance of their success."

The next visitor came from over seas, but he found here the memories of his generous and ardent youth. Lafayette came in August, 1824, and the scene is presented for us by the accounts of many enthusiastic witnesses. He rode to Cambridge through cheering throngs, and President Kirkland, who excelled in just such functions, welcomed him on the steps of Uni\'ersity 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, yovu" course shall take j'ou, the ear that hears j^ou 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, thej- 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 Vassal estates by Nathanael Tracy of Newburyport. 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 Inman conveyed his estate to Leonard Jands. Meanwhile, Chief-Justice Francis Dana had acquired very large holdings 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 covered practically all of what became Cambridgeport . In like manner, what is now East Cambridge came into the hands of two owners. The Phips fann had been divided among the children of Lieutenant- Governor Phips; but before the war David Lechmere, the husband of one of the daughters, had bought the shares of the others, with the exception of that owned by Mrs. Andrew Boardman. The Boardmans were patriots, but the

Lechmeres, like all the rest of the Phips connection, were Tories. The Lechmere estate was confiscated and was bought, as we have seen, by Andrew Cabot. Through several transfprs it passed Andrew igie, who thus owned about fivesixths of the w hole region known as Lechmere's Point, while the Boardmans retained title to the southw esterly part of the old Phips farm, w hich reached to the boundaries of the Jarvis estate. It was natural that these gentlemen, Messrs. Dana, Jarvis, Craigie and Boardman, should thus become much interested in the development of the eastern part ot the town.

For a hundred and thirty \ears the ' Great Bridge" at the foot of Boylston Street had been the only means of gc tting across the river, except by boat. On March 9, 1792, Judge Dana and sundry associates were incorporated as the "Proprietors of West Boston Bridge," with authority 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 proprietors were required to pay three hundred pounds a year to Harvard College. The bridge was at once constructed, together with a causeway 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 causeway 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. Jan.-is built a substantial dike along the marshes where the river bent to the northeast, thus reclaiming a considerable section of low-hang land. Ambitious plans were made old roads, one running from Charlestown Neck to Watertown, and the other from the Great Bridge to Menotomy and crossing on the Common, 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 Westem Avenue to the southwest, and Hampshire Street and Medford Street (now Webster Avenue) to the northwest. Two turnpike companies were incorporated. One built the road to Concord, which is now Concord Avenue, and for transforming the river-bank into a commercial 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 Htigation, so that it had to be withdrawn from sale. Mr. Boardman, however, in 1801, brought his large holdings into the market by laying out Windsor Street through his land, thus gi^'ing it a connection \\ath the bridge and the fast-growang village of Cambridgeport. The Jan-is estate was sold at auction, and Mr. Jonathan L.

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 motild 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

"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 Harvard a crackle and a cheerfulness, for the loss of which the greater warmth of anthracite hardly compensates. New England life, to

"The greater part of what is now Cambridgeport was then (in the native dialect) a 'huckleberry 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 caravansary than a suburb. The chief featiire of the place was its inns, of which there were five, with 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 underneath, 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 seaport in Bo6ton. 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 ciurier'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 Coturt 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 disposed 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 connected the bridge with Cambridge Common and the coiontry 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 Coimty 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 count}' would use and occupy the buildings. The town of Cambridge protested against the removal 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 speculation 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 seciu-e 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 bom 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 feehng too strongly the force of suburban gravitation. Approaching it from the west, by what was then called the New Road (Mt. Auburn Street), you would pause on the brow of Symond's Hill to enjoy a view sing\ilarly 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 Episcopal Church, and the slim, yellow spire of the parish meeting-house. On your right, the Charles slipped smoothly through green and 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, unspeculative, without enterprise, sufficing to itself, and only showing such differences from the original types as the public school and the system 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 activities. 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 Cambridge 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 curiosities; 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. Peabody has told us, the larger part of the treasurer'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 connected 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 Commencement 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 contributed towards the singing, the speaking, and the pajnment 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 bom, 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.

A History Of Cambridge, Massachusetts

The field opposite, now covered largely b\' Memorial Hall, was then an open common, where I remember to have seen students climbing or swinging on Dr. Charles Pollen'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 Broadwav, 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, behind 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 Bhss,' at a time when the older boys, Lowell and Story, had begun to read and declaim to us from to play in what was said to be an old Indian comiield, 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 Broadwa3^ 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 comer of Mt. Auburn Street and the Parkway) were an equally favorite playplace; we stopped there on our return from bathing, or botanizing, or butterfiying 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 colleague and successor. Mr. Hilliard died in 1790, and two years later began the long and 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 Cambridgeport 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 comer of Matthews Hall, was the College fire-engine house, before it was moved across the Square. Behind the church, standing 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 comer 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 formed; and in 1829, came the division of the First Chiu-ch itself. The more conservative part of the congregation, being a minority of the Parish but a majority of the Church, withdrew and organized the Shepard Congregational Society, of which Dr. Holmes became the minister. The First Parish settled Rev. William Newell, and, in 1833, built a new meeting-house which is still standing opposite the College gate. The old house was removed, and the site included in the College Yard.

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 architect 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 the College Chapel, \\dth seats on one side for the seniors and sophomores, and on the other for juniors and freshmen, and with different entranee doors, "so that there might be no hostile collision on the stairs," says Dr. Peabody. "In front of the ptdpit was a stage for public declamations and exhibitions, and on each side of it a raised sentrj-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 -^ere 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 ci\'ilization. The feather-bed - mattresses not having come into general use - was regarded 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 ston,-, 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 thirtytwo rooms each, the lower floors being reser\-ed 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 extra\-agant price to certain Southern members of the senior class; but even Southerners, though reputed to be fabulously rich, did not aspire to 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 sHces 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 wellordered tables. There was another recitation in the afternoon, except on Saturday; then most useful invention of our age - were not yet. Coals were carefully buried in ashes over night to start the morning fire; while in simimer, 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 recievening 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 Meetinghouse, and on the comer 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 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 ver}^ particular 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 Hghts 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. Indeed . . . the roads then were so lonely that we used to make up parties of four or five to attend meetings or lectures in Boston."

On the corner of Boylston Street stood Deacon Levi Farwell's country store. On the west side of Harvard Square stood the old County Court House (on the present site of the Har\'ard 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 country's laws, and who thus had his curiosity exemplarily gratified. Times have changed since the cellar beneath it was tenanted by the tvnn brothers Snow. Oystermen were they indeed.

Old Court House

silent in their subterranean burrow, and taking the ebbs and flows of custom vnth \'ival\4an serenity. Careless of the months ^\nth 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 Samuel Webber, who succeeded Dr. Willard as President of the College in 1806, at the time when he was Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. Next to this was a long structure "iv 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. About on the location of the present Church Street, was College House No. 1, a wooden three-story btulding 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 graduates 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 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 markethouse, 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, Lechmere, 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. Longfellow. It is related that one day Mr. Longfellow found Mrs. Craigie sitting by an open window through which innumerable cankerwonns 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 reputation. 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 Elmwood 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 Cambridge people treated their fellow-citizen with anything but the respect due to his office. Dr. Charles Lowell, the beloved and honored minister of the West Church in Boston, bought Elmwood in 1817, and there, in 1819, his son, James Russell Lowell, was bom.

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,

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 Oilman, of Charleston, while a guest at the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary' of the College, wTote " Fair Harv^ard." 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 ^-iolet crab, held out horizontally by the high collar of his shepherd'sgray 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 independent 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 \-ielded up her secrets at once, without 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 foimd therein in a tall octavo. It was he who introduced vaccination to this Western World. Malicious persons disputing his claim to this distinction, he published this advertisement: 'Lost, a gold snuffbox, wdth the inscription, "The Jenner of the Old World to the Jenner of the New." Wlioever 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 bclie\'ing the box as \'isionary as the claim it was meant to buttress with a semblance of reality. He used to stop and say goodmorning kindly, and pat the shotilder of the blushing school-boy who now, with the fierce snowstonns wildering without, sits and remembers sadly tho.se old meetings and partings in the June sunshine."

came, on Holmes Place, to four old houses. In one lived Cabcl 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 bom, 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 bom in 1809, and christened Oliver Wendell Holmes. The house may be taken as typical of the better houses of the \'illage, and Dr. Holmes' description of his birthplace is classical.

"The worst of a modem stylish mansion," he wTote, "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 misanthropic 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 centuT}^ 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 mysterious 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 >-ou tread on you will go to - the Lord have mercy on you! where will >-ou go to? and the same being crossed by narrow bridges of boards, on which you may put your feet, but w4th 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 clippings of the broad-axe, showing the rude way in which the timber was shaped as it came, full of sap, from the neighboring forest. It is a realm of darkness and thick dust, and shroudlike cobwebs and dead things they wrap in their gray folds. For a garret is like a seashore, 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 unpresentable 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 ingeniously 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 distinguished 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 Provincial 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 expedition, - all these things have been told, and perhaps none of them need be doubted.

"It was a great happiness to have been bom 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 bom 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 bom. 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 courtliness and refinement which belonged to the bom 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 Steams, 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 wiUingly 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/' 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 bom in Cambridgeport, 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 distinguish herself and made much the same impression in society that she did in after years." She wTote her own description of her life in Cambridge at the age of fifteen, which was probably not in accordance with the usual rule of Cambridge families. Her day was occupied as follows: she rose before five, walked an hour, practised at the piano until seven, ^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 generation. "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 prominent object. . . . For some reason or other she could never deliver herself in print as she did with her lips." Margaret Fuller left Cambridgeport 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, Charming and the Transcendentahsts was that, as Colonel Higginson 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 servdces great; one whose intellect was vmcommon, 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 Cambridge. "If," wrote Lowell, "it were svirprising that Allston should have become a painter at all, how almost miraculous that he should have been a great and original one! I call him original deliberately, because, though his school be essentially ItaHan, 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 melodramatic 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 phj'sical or intellectual) of Boston, and the dusts of Cambridgeport assailed it in vain. To that bare wooden studio one might go to breathe Venetian air, and, better yet, the very spirit wherein the elder brothers of Art labored, etherealized by metaphysical speculation, 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 Lapland 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 emboldened modesty; here was ambition, undebased by rivalry and incapable of the side-long look; and all these massed and harmonized together into a purity and depth of character, into a tone , which made the daily life of the man the greatest masterpiece of the aritst."

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 emigrant 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 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 pecuHarities 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 uniform 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, dragging the Amphibium across the hills, and using it as a ferry for themselves 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 Independence. They were fortunate enough to fall in with some experienced guides and traders who knew the passes over the mountains; and on the 4th of July they drank the nation's health from the water of the Snake River, which flows to the Columbia and the Pacific. On the river they established Fort Hall, which passed later into the hands of the Hudson Bay Company and became an important station for the emigrant trains that later made their way to Oregon and California. Wyeth's enterprise was shortlived, and he and his brothers came back to take up their old life in Cambridge. They could not accomphsh anything in the face of the well-estabUshed monopoly of the Hudson Bay Company throughout the Northwest; but the expedition not only revealed the survival of the pioneer quality of an old Cambridge stock, but as a genuine American attempt at colonization and settlement in the Northwest it played its part in the negotiations and treaties which finally made the great region, which is now Oregon and Washington, a part of the United States.

But the distinctive atmosphere of the Cambridge of the first half of the nineteenth century was that made by the presence of the College. The academic habit of thought and life, which characterized so many of the leading citizens, made Cambridge differ from other or neighboring towns. It was not only the natural place for Lowell and Holmes and Margaret Fuller to be born in, and for Longfellow and AUston to make their homes in, but the everyday life of the College people, the ways of thinking and talking, their interests and their characteristic union of simplicity and refinement, limited means and scholarly pursuits, plain living and high thinking, gave a unique charm to the old village. Kirkland and Quincy ruled the College world. The duties of the President had changed since the days of the earlier leaders, when their task was described with sufficient accuracy as "thankless labor, unrequited service, arrearages unpaid, posthumous applause, a doggerel dirge and a Latin epitaph." President Kirkland was, according to Longfellow, "a jolly little man." He came to the presidency from the ]3ulpit of the New South Church in Boston, and brought with him the reputation of a man of broad culture, of social charm, and of remarkable gifts as a preacher. He had, too, a kindly wit which enlivened his practical wisdom. When someone called on him for advice about a church quarrel over the dogma of "the perseverance of the saints," he replied: "Here in Boston we have no difficulty on that score; what troubles us here is the perseverance of the sinners." Lowell gives a pleasant account of him: "This life was good enough for him, and the next not too good. The gentlemanlike pervaded even his prayers. His were not the manners of a man of the world, nor of a man of the other world either; but both met in him to balance each other in a beautiful equilibrium. Prajang, he leaned forward upon the piilpit-cushion, as for conversation, and seemed to feel himself (wdthout irreverence) on terms of friendly, but courteous familiarity with heaven." He knew well how to deal with undergraduates. "Hearing that Porter's flip (which was exemplar}-) had too great an attraction for the collegians, he resolved to investigate the matter himself. Accordingly, entering the old inn one day, he called for a mug of it, and ha\nng drunk it, said, 'And so, Mr. Porter, the young gentlemen come to drink your flip', do they ? ' ' Yes, sir, - sometimes.' 'Ah, well, I should think they would. Good day, Mr. Porter,' and departed saying nothing more." ^'M!''«i- "On Sundays," wrote

Dr. Peabody, "Dr. Kirkland generally preached once, - in the afternoon, if I remember aright; and his sermons were listened to with interest and admiration, and that rather for the structure, meaning, and point of each successive sentence, than for any continuous course of thought or reasoning. He preached almost always on the ethics of daily life ; and his sermons were made up for the most part of epigrammatic, pro\-erb-like utterances, gems of the purest lustre, alike in diction and in significance, but, if not unstrung, strung on so fine a thread that only he could see it. Indeed, we had a strong suspicion that his sermons were put together on the spot. He used to carry into the pulpit a pile of loose leaves, from which he was visibly employed in making a selection during the singing of the hymns. I doubt whether he often, if ever, wrote a whole sermon after he came to Cambridge. The law that underHes the arithmetical rule of ' permutation and combination,' gave him, in a limited number of detached leaves, an unlimited number of potential sermons. His voice was pleasant and musical; his manner in the pulpit, grave and dignified; but it was commonly quite evident that he felt less interest in his preaching than his hearers did."

When a stroke of paralysis obliged Dr. Kirkland to retire while still in the prime of life, it was desirable that his successor should be a man of administrative experience and acquainted with the management of financial interests. Josiah Quincy was a man of distinguished lineage, and of unquestioned courage and ability. He had been a prominent member of the Massachusetts Legislature, a judge of the Municipal Court, a member of Congress and mayor of Boston, and became, as one of his successors, Dr. Walker, said of him, "the great organizer of the University." During his administration the fast-growing library was housed in Gore Hall; Dane Hall was built for the Law School; the Astronomical Observatory was established, first in the Dana House at the corner of Quincy and Harvard Streets, and later on the Concord Avenue hill, where it now stands. He reformed the state of the College Commons, cleansed the Commencement season of rowdyism, systematized the courses of study, and filled the life of the expanding University with his characteristic vigor. In his intercourse with people, Mr. Quincy lacked the consummate tact that had distinguished Dr. Kirkland. He could not remember names, and when a student - someone sent for but a few minutes before, came into his office, it was to be met with the abrupt question, "What's your name?" So much was this his habit that if, as occasionally happened, he did recognize a face, he would probably say, "Well, Brown, what's your name?" Rev. Artemas B. Muzzey, the longtime minister of the Cambridgeport Parish, recalled in his Reminiscences how "an extraordinary energy pervaded the whole character and life of Mr. Quincy; whatever his hand found to do he did with his might. This trait was seen in his emphatic mode of conversation. I often noticed a reaction of this intensity. He would express himself with great clearness and force, and, notwithstanding he was a thorough gentleman and full of courtesy, he would in a few moments - even while one perhaps was responding to his words - from the power of his temperament, be sometimes lost in oblivion, and, seeming unable to resist the tendency, even close his eyes as if overtaken by sleep.

"To this peculiar temperament, I think, was owing in part his occasional lapse of memory. He often forgot the names of those he knew perfectly well, even of college students, whom he wished specially to address aright. The story was told, probably without a sure foundation, that he went one day to the Cambridge post-office for his mail, and, upon his asking if there were any letters for him, the clerk, being that day a newcomer in the office, asked, 'For what name, sir ? ' ' For what name,' Mr. Quincy replied, 'you know me of course.' In his absence of mind, as the story went, he for the moment actually forgot his own name. Turning away he was met by a friend who thus accosted him: 'Good-morning, Mr. Quincy.' 'Ah, Quincy,' said he, returning to the clerk, 'are there any letters for Mr. Quincy?' I think those who had known and enjoyed the benefit of the remarkable memory for names of his predecessor. Dr. Kirkland, liked to repeat, and would sometimes exaggerate, anecdotes of this kind.

' ' The industry of this rare man was as remarkable as his intellect and eminent virtues. I remember in a conversation upon the dangers and evils of the prevalent excessive reading of newspapers, he once said: 'For myself, I devote but ten minutes a day to the papers.' Perhaps this will appear to many a meagre allotment of time for such reading. But it reveals that marvellous economy of time which enabled him not only to read so many solid books, but to write volume upon volume himself, in addition to his practical labors, as a lawA^er and as a business man, the discharge of his manifold offices as representative in the State and National Legislatures, on the bench as mayor, for six years of a rapidly-growing city, for sixteen years as president of Harvard College,

A Hlstory Of Cambridge, Massachusetts

Mr. Quincy lived to be the oldest graduate of the College, and sat for his photograph with his four successors in office, Everett, Sparks, Walker and Felton. He retained to his ninetysecond year his keen interest in all College affairs, and wrote its history, a book which found its origin in the oration which Mr. Quincy delivered in 1836, on the occasion of the two of the Law School. The Dane Professorship of Law was founded with the condition that the first occupant of the chair shotild be Judge Story, then at the height of his fame as a justice of the Supreme Court. It was not altogether an inviting opportunity, for the Law School had no building, a very small library, and during the year before his appointment, not a single student. The fame of the great judge soon changed that discouraging situation, and so interesting were the lectures that the students