Cambridge City (part 9 of 15)

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

Presidents Of Harvard University

Of the College professors who gave to Cambridge its distinctive atmosphere, there were many who bore names famous outside of the academic world. George Ticknor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell served successively as Professors of Belles- Lettres; Norton, Palfrey, Willard, Noyes and Francis were upbuilding the Divinity School, and Joseph Story was laying the foundations were willing to give up their holiday's for the sake of attending. Richard H. Dana, just back from his famous "Two Years Before the Mast," was one of the students. He wrote: "At the close of a term there was one more case than there was an afternoon to hear it in, unless we took Saturday. Judge Story said: 'Gentlemen, the only time we can hear this case is Saturday afternoon. No one is obliged or expected to attend. I am to hold Court in Boston until two o'clock. I will ride directly out, take a hasty dinner, and be here by halfpast three o'clock, and hear the case, if you are willing.' He looked round the school for a reply. We felt ashamed, in our own business, where we were alone interested, to be outdone in zeal and labor by this aged and distinguished man, to whom the case was but child's play, a tale twice told, and who was himself pressed down by almost incredible labours. The proposal was unanimously accepted. The judge was on the spot at the hour, the school was never more full, and he sat until late in the evening, hardly a man leaving the room."

Among the law students in 1838 was Lowell. "I am reading Blackstone," he wrote, "with as good a grace and as few wry faces as I may." Eight months later he could write more cheerfully. " I begin to like the law. And therefore it is quite interesting. I am determined that I will like it, and therefore I do." On Story's death, in 1845, the school numbered one hundred and sixty-five students, who had flocked to his teaching, not only from New England, but from almost every State in the Union.

During the sixteen years in which he filled the chair Judge Story wrote all of his legal textbooks and his treatises, filling no less than thirteen volumes. He lived in the house on Brattle Street which is still standing near to the comer of the street which bears his name. "With fully two men's stated work," wrote Dr. Peabody, "he had time for every good cause and worthy enterprise. There was no public meeting for a needed charity, for educational interests, in behalf of art or letters, or for the advancement of a conservatively liberal theology, in which his advocacy was not an essential part of the programme. When there were no other speakers of note, it was enough to hear him; and he was not unwilling to occupy, and never failed to fill to the delight of his hearers, all the time that could be given him. When there were others whom it was desirable to hear, he was generally made chairman; and in his opening speech he always contrived to say as much as all those who followed him, and often unconsciously took the wind out of their sails. He formed a large part of the life of Cambridge society. His son is the only other man that I have ever known who could talk almost continuously for several successive hours, and leave his hearers with an appetite for more. Wherever Judge Story was, he did not usurp the conversation, but the floor was spontaneously and gladly conceded to him; and his listeners were entertained with an unintermitted flow of wit, himior, anecdote, literary criticism, comments on passing events, talk on the highest themes of thought, - the transition from topic to topic never abrupt, but always nattu-al and graceful. . . . Judge Story was a good citizen of Cambridge, and took an active part in all important municipal affairs. No man did more than he in securing for Cambridge the right to enclose the Common, in opposition to the towns lying farther in the interior, which claimed as of immemorial prescription the unrestricted and unbounded right of way for the herds of cattle that were driven through Cambridge to Brighton. In fine, one can hardly have filled a larger place in the community of his residence than he filled, with prompt and faithful service, with overflowing kindness and good will, and with the grateful recognition of people of every class and condition."

The theologians played a large part in the social and intellectual life of Cambridge. Professor Andrews Norton lived in Cambridge for forty-three years, and made his beautiful house at Shady Hill a place of pilgrimage for two generations of students. For twenty years he served as tutor, librarian and lectiirer; and then for twenty-three he gave himself to his independent work as a Biblical scholar. His successor in the Professorship of Sacred Literature was John Gorham Palfrey, who was not only famous for the thoroughness of his scholarship and the charm of his teaching, but also for his labors as editor of the North American Review, and for his anti-slavery words and works. After his withdrawal from teaching he continued to live on the ample estate which he had made at the end of Divinity Avenue, and added to his fame by writing his "History of New England," and by serving as a member of Congress and as the Postmaster of Boston.

Sidney Willard was another theological professor who was also a useful citizen. He held the Hancock professorship of Hebrew, and was editor of the American Monthly Review and later of the Christian Register. Like Dr. Palfrey, after withdrawing from teaching, he gave his time and ability to the public service. He was for several terms in the Legislature, then a member of the Governor's Council, and for three years Mayor of Cambridge after the organization of the city.

Among the professors of the College proper under the administration of Presidents Kirkland and Quincy there were many others who gave unique quality to Cambridge life. There was Edward Everett, who left the pulpit to become the first incumbent of the Eliot Professorship of Greek, and who was afterwards for four years president of the University; and there was John Quincy Adams, who was the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. These are great names in American history, but the bearers of these names walked our Cambridge streets and stopped for their letters at the Post-office along with the humblest of their fellow-citizens. Their successors were men of lesser fame, but their personalities gave flavor to the town. Professor John S. Popkin was the best Greek scholar of his generation. He was a man of majestic presence, but of very odd appearance and manner. Lowell describes his "great silver spectacles of the heroic period, such as scarce twelve noses of these degenerate days could bear;" and Dr. Peabody said: "Shyness and solitude gave him an aspect and manners more eccentric than can easily be imagined in these days, when, under the assimilating influence of modern habits, idiosyncrasies have faded out, and every man means and aims to look like every other. His dress, indeed, was, in an historical sense, that of a gentleman; but his tailor must have been the last strr\avor of an else long extinct race. He never walked. His gait was always what is termed a dog-trot, slightly accelerated as he approached its terminus. He jerked out his words as if they were forced from him by a nervous spasm, and closed every utterance with a sound that seemed like a muscular movement of suction. In his recitation-room he sat by a table rather than behind it, and grasped his right leg, generally ^\^th both hands, lifting it as if he were making attempts to shoulder it, and more nearly accomplishing that feat daily than an ordinary gjTnnast would after a year's special training. As chairman of the parietal government, he regarded it as his official duty to preserve order in the College Yard: but he was the frequent cause of disorder; for nothing so amused the students as to see him in full chase after an offender, or dancing round a bonfire; while it was well understood that as a detective, he was almost always at fault.

"Oddities were then not rare, and excited less surprise and animadversion than they woiild now. The students held him in reverence, and at the same time liked him. His were the only windows of parietal officers that were never broken. Personal insult or outrage to him would have been resented by those who took the greatest delight in indirect methods of annoying him. Once, indeed, when he was groping on the floor in quest of smothered fire, in a room that had been shattered by an explosion of gunpowder, a bucket of water was throwTi on him by a youth, whose summary expulsion was the only case of the kind that I then knew in which the judgment of the students was in entire harmony with that of the Faculty. As may be supposed, he was not without a nickname, which he accepted as a matter of course from the students ; but hearing it on one occasion from a young man of dapper, jaunty, unacademic aspect, he said to a friend who was standing with him, 'What right has that man to call me " Old Pop " ? He was never a member of Harvard College.'

"Dr. Popkin's only luxury was the ver>' moderate use of tobacco. Every noon and every evening, Sundaj^s excepted, he trotted to an apothecary's shop, laid down two cents, then the price for what would now cost five times as much, and carried to his room a single Spanish cigar. Of course, though the shop was open, he would not go to it on Sunday ; and he would not duplicate his Saturday's purchase, lest he might be tempted to duplicate his Saturday evening's indulgence. A friend who often visited him on Sunday evening always took with him two cigars, one of which the doctor gratefully accepted."

Dr. Popkin retired in 1833, but lived, chiefly occupied in reading the Greek Testament and the Greek poets, until 1852. During his teaching days he had lived at first in a College room and later in the old Wigglesworth house next to the President's house. He afterwards built a house on Massachusetts Avenue (then North Avenue) next to the house of his classmate and lifelong Associate, Professor Levi Hedge. The old gentlemen held pleasant intercourse daily over the fence, but it is said that neither, ever entered the other's house. Dr. Hedge was for many years the professor of logic and metaphysics. He had written the text-book which was used in his classes. He did not attempt to teach, but expected his students to memorize the book. According to common report he was in the habit of sajdng: " It took me fourteen years, with the assistance of the adult members of my family, to write this book, and I am sure that you cannot do better than to employ the precise words of the learned author." He is best remembered, by a later generation, as the father of Dr. Frederic Henry Hedge, the great preacher, theologian and German scholar.

The successors of John Quincy Adams in the Boylston professorship were both noteworthy men, Joseph McKean (1809- 1818) and Edward T. Channing (1819- 1851). Channing it was who formed the English style of a generation of American writers and speakers who belonged to what is sometimes called the golden age of American literature.

Three learned and beloved professors of this period became successively presidents of the University. Jared Sparks was the professor of history from 1838 to 1849, and president from 1849 to 1853. His voluminous and painstaking work as author and editor sustained the literary pre-eminence of the College. James Walker, one of the most influential preachers of his generation, became professor of philosophy in 1838, and was president from 1853 to 1860. After his retirement his home on Sparks Street was the resort of innumerable leaders of the yoimger generation who sought the guidance of his farseeing wisdom and rich experience. Cornelius C. Felton began to teach Greek at Cambridge in 1832, succeeded Dr. Popkin in the Eliot pro-

Divinity Hall

The great name of Benjamin Pierce appeared in fifty-four of the annual catalogues of the University, and he died at the beginning of his fiftieth year of continuous service as tutor and professor. His fame as a mathematician early became worldwide, and added not a little to the renown of Cambridge. Asa Gray came to Cambridge in 1842, and for forty-six years his name and fame made Cambridge illustrious in the eyes of all who loved plants and flowers, or who sought to find the secrets of natiire. He established the Botanic Garden on Garden Street, and was the foremost of American botanists. The Observatory was established in President Quincy's administration, and under the guidance of William Cranch Bond soon became the most renowned place of astronomical research in America.

Finally, among the scholars who gave to Cambridge its unique distinction, were a number of distinguished gentlemen of foreign birth, who came to the town because of its literary associations, or were connected with the University life. Francis Sales, a high-bred French gentleman, was the tutor in French and Spanish from 1816 to 1854, and was worthily held in high regard in the society of his adopted town, introducing into what may well have been a somewhat prim and formal intercourse, a perpetually youthful vivacity, and the manners and dress of a Frenchman of the Old Regime. Lowell wrote of him: "Perpetual childhood dwelt in him, the childhood of his native Southem France, and its fixed air was all the time bubbling up and sparkling and winking in his eyes. It seemed as if his placid old face were only a mask behind which a merry Cupid had ambushed himself, peeping out all the while, and ready to drop it when the play grew tiresome. Every word he uttered seemed to be hilarious, no matter what the occasion. If he were sick, and you \4sited him, if he had met with a misfortune (and there are few men so wise that they can look even at the back of a retiring sorrow with composure), it was all one; his great laugh went off as if it were set like an alarm clock, to run down, whether he would or no, at a certain nick. Even after an ordinary Good morning! (especially if to an old pupil, and in French), the wonderful Haw, haw, haw! by Shorge! would burst upon you unexpectedly.

would it have occurred to him to turn it into view, and insist that his friends should look at it with him. Nor was this a mere outside goodhumor ; its source was deeper, in a true Christian kindliness and amenity." t- I .

Charles Follen was the first teacher of German at Harvard, and a man of remarkable gifts. He had been a student and professor at the University of Giessen; and when driven from Germany because of his participation in certain patriotic and insurrectionary' demonstrations, found refuge in Switzerland. Encouraged by Lafayette and by Professor Ticknor he came to like a salute of artillery on some holiday which you had forgotten. Ever^-thing was a joke to him, - that the oath of allegiance had been administered to him by your grandfather, - that he had taught Prescott his first Spanish (of which he was proud), - no matter what. Everything came to him marked by Nature Right side up, with care, and he kept it so. The world to him, as to all of us, was like a medal, on the obverse of which is stamped the image of Joy, and on the reverse that of Care. S. never took the fooUsh pains to look at that other side, even if he knew its existence; much less

America, and in 1825 became instructor in German at Cambridge and proved a most stimulating leader. It was Dr. Follen who introduced g^-mnastics in the College. Under his enthusiastic direction the Delta, where Memorial Hall now stands, was fitted up as an out-of-door gymnasimn; and imder Dr. Pollen's leadership there first began the interest in athletics which has in later years filled so prominent a place in student life. Dr. Follen married Miss Eliza Lee Cabot, and built a house on Waterhouse Street, at the comer of the street that now bears his name. Withdrawing from teaching in 1835, he took up the work of the ministry and was the founder of what is now the FoUen Chiirch at East Lexington. He lost his life in 1840, in the burning of the steamer Lexington on Long Island Sound.

Charles Beck was another notable German scholar who was implicated in the same demonstrations against autocratic government in Germany that had forced Dr. FoUen to fly. They were comrades on the voyage to America; and, in 1832, he became professor of Latin at Harvard. He taught for eighteen years and then retired, but his home, at the corner of Quincy and Harvard Streets where the Harvard his boundless sympathies, his extraordinary gift of making friends, his genial personality, led all his hearers captive. In 1848 the Lawrence Scientific School was organized at Cambridge ; and Agassiz became Professor of Natiu-al History, and another great scientist who was Cambridge trained, Jeffries Wyman, became Professor of Anatomy. Agassiz at once established himself at Cambridge with a company of friends and assistants who had followed him from Europe, and who together made a cheerful household. In this domestic group were Count Francois de Pourtales, M. Edward Desor, M. Jaques Burkhard, the draughtsman, and M. A.

Union now stands, was long the center of a boundless hospitality. Beck Hall, the earliest of the privately-owned dormitories for students, was built by his daughter on part of the estate ; and his name is also borne by the old Cambridge Post of the Grand Army of the Republic. He was a most ardent patriot, and foremost among Cambridge citizens at the time of the Civil War in recruiting and providing hospital suppUes.

Most famous among these memorable Camt)ridge citizens of foreign birth was Louis Agassiz. Agassiz came to Boston in 1846 to lecture at the Lowell Institute. His scientific enthusiasm,

Sourel, the lithographic artist. M. Christison, an old Swiss minister, was their housekeeper and -homemaker. Later, Professor Guyot arrived and many guests, chiefly foreign scientists, were constantly coming and going. Down on the marsh by the Boylston Street Bridge was an old shanty on piles. This Agassiz utilized for the storage of his first collections. Boards nailed against the walls were the cases for specimens, and a single rough table completed the laboratory. Such were, in 1848, the htmible beginnings of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, now one of the greatest institutions of the kind in the world. In 1850 Agassiz married Miss Elizabeth Cabot Gary, an alliance which made him a member of a large and happy family circle, and brought him into especial intimacy with his colleague. Professor C. C. Felton, who became his brother-in-law. Agassiz not only lectured in all parts of the country, but carried on a vast scientific correspondence; and Cambridge became the Mecca of an everincreasing body of students of zoology, geology and cognate subjects. In 1854 the Agassizs moved into the house which the CoUege had built for them, at the comer of Quincy Street and Broadway, and there they carried on for eight years, in addition to all the great public labors, a private school of the highest reputation. The Museum building, which is popularly known by the name of Agassiz, was begun in 1860. To the life and work of this most eminent of all American students of nature and his associates and successors, Cambridge owes not only its incomparable Museum, but also its fame as the chief American center for scientific research. Such were some of the remarkable group that made the old Cambridge of the first half of the nineteenth century a singularly interesting place of residence. A more agreeable or stimulating society, or one more united in habits of life, common intellectual interests and happy personal relationships it would be difficult to recall. Longfellow, writing from Rome, told of a talk he had had with Darwin: "Why," said Darwin, "what a set of men you have in Cambridge. Both our Universities put together cannot furnish the like. Why, there is Agassiz, he counts for three."

If Cambridge was thus renowned for the quality of the people who lived there, it is interesting to record that new reputation came to the town in the nineteenth centurj' because of the fame of the people whose bodies were brought to rest in Cambridge soil. In 1831 the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, which owned a beautifully variegated tract of land at the western end of Cambridge, was authorized by act of legislature to establish there a rural cemetery-. Judge Story was the leader in this movement, and he it was who delivered the dedication address on September 24, 1831. Mount Auburn was laid out in accordance with designs made by Mr. Alexander Wadsworth, and was the first, as it is still the most beautiful, of the wellplanned country cemeteries in the United States. Mount Auburn is in no small degree the Westminster Abbey of our Nation, for \vithin its gates rest many of the most famous of Americans.

The City

THE time had arrived when Cambridge must become a city. Between 1840 and 1845 the population had nearly doubled and with this sudden growth in mmibers there had been an almost equal increase in the town's valuation. The habits of local government which were suited to a community of a few thousand people were strained to meet the needs of a population of over twelve thousand. The stormy debates about the inclosing of the Common had demonstrated the inadequacy of the old Court-house at Har\'ard Square to accommodate the voters, and the town meeting had been obliged to adjourn across the street to the Meeting-house. An agitation for larger quarters resulted in the building, in 1832, of anew townhouse on Norfolk Street in Cambridgeport. This was another grievance for the people of the Old Village who had already seen the County Courts transferred from Harvard Square to East Cambridge. Most of the new population and wealth were in the new villages, and jealousy between the three sections still disturbed the civic life of the town. The spirit of rivalry between "the Port" and "the Point," which had begun -ndth the building of the two bridges, was still active and both of the new villages had a long-standing grievance against Old Cambridge, because of the real or supposed unwillingness of the taxpayers who lived there to be taxed for the building of schools and streets in the newer parts of the town. Communication between the three villages was slow and at some seasons even difficult. No one section was strong enough to control the town meeting, but there was constant wrangling. One solution of the difficulty was to still further subdivide the town which had already seen Lexington, West Cambridge (ArHngton), Newton and Brighton carved out of its original territory. Another solution was to effect "a more perfect union" by adopting a city form of government. The latter course prevailed. A petition of some of the residents of Old Cambridge, presented to the General Court in 1842, and praying to be set off as a distinct town, was rejected; and a petition for a City Charter adopted at a town meeting held on January 14, 1846, was granted by the General Court with a referendum to the voters of the to\\Ti. The act incorporating the city was signed by Governor Briggs on March 17, 1846. On March 30th, the voters, by a vote of 645 to 224, adopted the charter, and on May 4th the first city government was inaugurated. It was no easy task to care for the fast-growing needs of the young city. It is difficult to realize how very recent in discovery and adoption are all the conveniences of community life which the people of a modem city take for granted. The old town of Cambridge had indeed provided for schools and for vet}' inexpensive schoolhouses, for the care of the poor in an almshouse, and for the occasional repair of the dirt roads, but that was all. When the citizens had arranged for the primary education of the children and made decent provision for the destitute, their civic obligations appeared to them to be fulfilled. Everything else that contributed to the health, comfort, protection and happiness of the people was disregarded or left to the initiative of private individuals. When the city was incorporated the streets were unpaved and unlighted. The sidewalks were uncurbed and neglected. Water was drawn from wells or rain-tanks attached to the individual houses. There were no sewers and no system of garbage collection. Not until 1852 was an ordinance adopted establishing a system of sewers, and not until 1865 did the city tmdertake to provide water. There was no provision for the care of the public health, nor means for preventing or checking epidemics: no hospital, no ambulance, no nurses. The people were accustomed to pasture their cattle on the grassy roads, and there was a good deal of resentment when the new city government tried to put a stop to that practice. A watchman or constable was employed in each of the three villages, but there was no police force, and indeed, to the credit of the citizens, it must be said that there was very seldom any occasion for the services of a policeman. There were several volunteer fire companies, but it sometimes happened that their efforts did more damage to property than the fire they were supposed to extinguish . There was no public library, and parks and playgrounds were undreamed of. The two bridges connecting Cambridge with Boston were both privately owned toll bridges, and did not become free until 1858. The hourly stage sufficed for public conveyance. Save for the works of the New England Glass Company at East Cambridge, some small soap factories in the Port, the brick-making on the Fresh Pond meadows, and the printing business at Harvard Square, there was no manufacturing. The chief industry was still the College, which, with the Divinity School and the Law School, had in the middle of the century some five hundred students. The business of teaching, lodging, boarding, clothing and generally providing for these temporary residents was the occupation of the majority of the households of the Old Village.

The new city government went to work promptly and judiciously. The first mayor was James D. Green, who had been the minister of the Unitarian Church in East Cambridge, and who had already served as a selectman and as a representative in the General Court. He served two terms and was succeeded by Professor Sidney Willard for three terms. Mr. Green was mayor again in 1853, and again during the early years of the Civil War. Police and fire departments were organized, roads began to be paved and sidewalks to be constructed. The "Old Villagers," the "Porters" and the "Pointers" began to lose their sectional distinctions. Houses grew up on the intervening fields and marshes until the three villages could no longer be distinguished. A community feeling more and more superseded the old rivalries. Conveniences and comforts multiplied, population continued to grow rapidly, and if the tax rate showed a steady increase there was no complaint, because the people received their money's worth. In twenty years in the place of the three villages there was a united, busy, suburban city, with many and

John Fiske, in his oration at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of the city pointed out that the chief causes of the growth of Cambridge were three in number : proximity to Boston, the reputation and growth of the University and its allied interests, and the availability of the city as a manufacturing center. The whole city shared in the general prosperity of the metropolitan district of Boston, and the early development of a transportation system gave Cambridge a good start. The Union Railway Company was organized in 1855, under the leadership of Gardiner G. Hubbard, Charles C. Little, Estes Howe and other active and sanguine citizens, and the first street cars began to run over the West Boston Bridge between Harvard Square and Bowdoin Square in Boston in the following year. The transportation facilities have since kept pace with the needs of the people. Electricity took the place of horses as a motive power on the street railways in 1889, and the rapid transit afforded by the new system of subways will undoubtedly again stimulate the growth of population.

Many of the leading merchants and professional men of Boston make their homes in Cambridge, where their families can enjoy access to sunlight and fresh air, to green lawns and gardens, where the schools are admirably conducted, where health conditions are the best of any city in the state, where there are no saloons and where the libraries and parks and the various activities of the University provide unusual facilities for education, recreation and social enjoyment. Famous lawyers like Henry W. Paine, Richard H. Dana and Chauncy Smith, who were leaders of the Boston Bar, were thus Cambridge residents; and among the many honorable business men who lived in Cambridge while conducting their affairs in Boston two should be especially remembered, both because of the service which they rendered to the civic life of their home city, and because they manufactured and distributed a characteristic Cambridge product. Henry 0. Houghton was the founder of the Riverside Press, and senior partner of the great publishing house of Houghton, Mifflin & Company. He served one year as Mayor of Cambridge. Charles C. Little was the founder of another great publishing firm, Little, Brown & Company, and he was the active promoter of many of the local enterprises which contributed to the development and welfare of Cambridge.

The growth of Cambridge has, in the second place, been influenced by the presence of the University. More than four thousand officers and students live in Cambridge and in the long vacation a thousand other students come to attend the summer courses. Every year a considerable number of families move to Cambridge in order to educate their children, and others come because of teaching appointments, or for purposes of scientific research. The cooperation between the University and the city for the public welfare is close and cordial. The great literary and scientific collections of the University are open to all under suitable restrictions. The Library, the Botanic Garden, the University Museum, the Fogg Museum of. Arts, the Peabody Museum, the Semitic Museum, the Germanic Museum, the Social Museum, are all places of large public resort. The University chapel is a center of interest for many Cambridge people, for throughout the year services are conducted there by eminent preachers of many different denominations. The University also provides a very large number of evening lectures open to the public. These lectures cover a wide range of subjects and afford to Cambridge people many opportunities of seeing and hearing distinguished men. The Boston Symphony Orchestra has for many years given an annual series of concerts under the auspices of the University, and there are many other opportunities of musical culture afforded by the presence of the College.

live in a city through which pours an ever-rising tide of healthy and manly youth making ready for worthy service in the world, but not yet burdened by its cares and griefs. It is agreeable to live where hundreds of men work with their minds bent primarily on intellectual pursuits, and kindled by enthusiasms which have nothing material as their object. "A society," said Horace Scudder, "in which a university is planted cannot easily make riches the measvire of social rank, and Cambridge thus still attracts the lovers of a literary life, who value in society the coin which is struck from the same mint as that they carry about with them in their empty pockets;" and William D. Howells wrote of his Cambridge experiences: "One could be openly poor in Cambridge without shame, for no one was very r i c.h there, and no one was proud of his riches. . . . The air of the Cambridge that I knew was sufficiently cool to be bracing but what was of good import in me flourished in it. The life of the place had its lateral limitations; sometimes its lights failed to detect excellent things that lay beyond it; but upward it opened inimitably."

It is easy to see that Cambridge should profit by its advantages as a place of suburban residence and as a resort for scholars, but it is more surprising to discover how its growth has been expedited by the establishment of numerous factories. In recent years the combined facilities for railroad and water communication in the eastern part of the city have proved peculiarly favorable to great maniifacturing plants. The Fitchburg Railroad skirts the northern boundary of the city and the main line of the Boston and Albany Railroad is just across the ri\-er on the south. The Grand Junction freight tracks run through the eastern end of Cambridgeport and East Cambridge, connecting these trunk lines that enter Boston and giving to that section of Cambridge unusual transportation advantages. The chief manufacturers are of various kinds of machinery, and among the other important industries may be mentioned printing and publishing, musical instruments (especially pianos and organs), furnitixre, clothing, soap and candles, biscuit-making, carriage-making and wheelwright's work, plumbing and plumber's materials, bricks and tiles and confectionery. "Most of the steel railway bridges in New England," said Mr. Fiske in the semi-centennial oration, "are built in Cambridge, and a considerable part of the world is supplied with hydraulic engines. The United States Navy comes to Cambridge for its pimaps, and this Cambridge product may be seen at work in Honolulu, in Sydney, in St. Petersburg. In the dimensions of its pork-packing industry Cambridge comes next after Chicago and Kansas City. Fifty years ago all the fish-netting used in America was made in England; today it is chiefly made in East Cambridge. The potteries on Walden Street turn out most of the flowerpots used in this coimtry." Such facts as these bear witness to the unusual facilities of the city, where coal can be taken and freight can be shipped at the very door of the factory, where the protection against fire is efficient, where skilled labor is easy to get, because good workmen find life comfortable and attractive, with healthy conditions of Kfe and unrivalled means of education for their children.

Among the Cambridge industries, several are especially characteristic and famous. The University Press is the successor of the first printing establishment in America, of which we have spoken as beginning in 1639. The Riverside Press sets the standards of bookmaking as one of the fine arts. The Athenaeum Press, founded by the ability and practical foresight of Edwin Ginn and his associates, turns out the school books that are used all over the country. The past half century has seen Cambridge come into the foremost rank among the printing and publishing centers of the world. A unique industry goes on in a modest establishment on Brookline Street, where, just before crossing the bridge, one comes upon a pleasant dwelling house, with a private observatory, and hard by it a plain brick building. That is the shop of Alvan Clark and Sons, who have carried the art of telescope-making to a height never reached before. There have been made the most powerful refracting telescopes in the world. The Mason and Hamlin Company built its factories on Broadway in 1874, and sends its famous organs and pianos all over the globe. The gardens of the world are watered, its fires quenched, its wheels tired, by the products of the Woven Hose Company, which, starting from very small beginnings in 1870, has grown into an enormous concern. The Cambridgeport plant of the New York Biscuit Company, formerly the famous factory of Mr. Frank A. Kennedy, is the second largest in the country. The John P. Squire Company Corporation, leading pork-packers; Ginn and Company, leading publishers.

The prosperity of Cambridge has also been upbuilt and its political and social life unified by the energies of its municipal administration and the supply of the varied needs of the community. When the city was organized its people drank from a thousand different private wells. All now drink alike from one public supply. It was in 1852 that a charter was granted to the Cambridge Water Works, and four years later Fresh Pond was set aside as the source of supply. A high service reservoir was established at the corner of Reservoir Street and Highland Street with a tower which was long a landmark. "I shall hardly expect to know mj^ native Cambridge when I come back," wrote Lowell from Europe, "what with railroads and water-works. . . . The waterworks I have no manner of conception of. Whence is the water to come? Where is the reservoir to be? And will a pipe run through Elmwood lane and cut off all the roots of the ash-trees? Will there be any fountains? Will it be against the law to mix anjrthing with the water?" And on his return he wrote: "Rome, Venice, Cambridge! I take it for an ascending scale, Rome being the first step and Cambridge the glowing apex. But you wouldn't know Cambridge - with its railroad and its waterworks and its new houses. . . . Think of a reservoir behind Mr. Wells's! And then think of Royal Morse and John Holmes and me in the midst of these phenomena! I seem to see our dear old village wriggling itself out of its

As the demand for water increased new sources of supply were utilized: Spy Pond (afterwards abandoned) and Wellington Brook, then Stony Brook, and Hobbs Brook, where large storage basins have been constructed. Fresh Pond is now practically the distributing reservoir, and the high ser\ace reservoir is now on the hill in Pay son Park at the west of the Pond. The surroundings of the Pond are now a Park under the control of the Water Board and appropriately named for Chester W. Kingsley, who was for dedicated with an address by President Edward Everett. In 1886 the high school, then located in the building at the comer of Broadway and Fayette Streets, was divided, the classical department becoming the Cambridge Latin School, and the remaining departments, the Cambridge English High School. The grammar schools of Cambridge take high rank among the similar organizations and the city has always enjoyed the ser\'ices of able and high-minded superintendents. The standards of attainment are such as befit a university town, and Cambridge spends more money on its schools than

At the time when Cambridge became a city a high school and a grammar school was conducted in each of the three villages; and one of the first steps of the new government was to bring the high schools together in a central school in Cambridgeport. This step still further reduced the sectional jealousies and promoted the growth of more sympathetic relations between the different parts of the city. The first building of this united high school stood at the comer of Simimer and Amory Streets and was most American cities. In addition to the public schools Cambridge enjoys the presence of a number of famous private schools. The Browm'e and Nichols School was started in 1883 and at once attained a very high reputation as a preparatory school for Harvard. The Cambridge School for Girls was opened in 1886, and has had a large success and an increasing influence. The Buckingham School for children on Buckingham Place and the School of the Misses Smith on Buckingham Street are also well known.

neighborhood not only these preparatory schools, but also independent professional schools. Particularly Cambridge has become the great center for the education of ministers. The Harvard Divinity School has had a long and honorable history. In 1867 the Episcopal Theological School was established at Cambridge on account of the advantages to be had from the academic associations. St. John's Memorial Chapel was built in 1869. Reed Hall, adjoining the Hbrary and commemorating the name of the chief founder of the School, was built in 1875, Lawrence Hall in 1880, and Winthrop Hall in 1893. In 1889 the New Church Theological School moved to Cambridge, and for its use there was purchased the residence of President Sparks. Tw0 years later the adjoining Greenough estate was purchased, so that the grounds of the School now extend along Quincy Street from Cambridge to Kirkland. In 1910 the Andover Theological School removed from Andover to Cambridge, and in the following year its beautiful and commodious building was dedicated.

Radcliffe College was begun in 1879 under the name of the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women. This Society was incorporated in 1882; at which time the Fay House, which is the oldest of the present group of buildings, was purchased, enlarged and improved. In 1894 the Society became Radcliffe College and entered in close and official relationship with Harvard University. The buildings of the College, opposite the Washington elm, already form a conspicuous and handsome group.

The need for parks and playgrounds did not arise in Cambridge until after the rapid growth of population had brought about undesirable congestion in several sections of the city. It was not until 1892 that the committee was appointed to consider the subject of parks. Since that time the development has been rapid. The embankment along the Charles River has been laid out with a continuous parkway. A tract of twelve acres in East Cambridge has been set aside and improved as the Cambridge Field, and a large tract in North Cambridge as a playground known as Rindge Field. The building of a dam across the mouth of the Charles River has turned the entire river into a splendid water 'park. At Captain's Island on the river bank a park of some thirty-eight acres is being developed. The new impulse for the purchase of playgrounds is effective, and considerable purchases of ground for these purposes have been made in the year in which this book goes to the press.

In 1846 when the City Charter was granted there were fourteen Protestant churches and one Catholic Church in Cambridge. The two branches of the First Church, the First Parish (Unitarian) and the Shepard Congregational Society dated from 1636 and Christ Church from 1761. The Cambridgeport Parish (Unitarian) had been organized in 1808. The first Methodist Church was organized in East Cambridge in 1813, the first Baptist Church in Cambridgeport (Central Square) in 1817, and the first Universalist Church in Cambridgeport in 1822. The first Roman Catholic Church was founded in East Cambridge in 1842. There are now fifty-three churches in Cambridge, representing all denominations.

In the care of the needy, in the adoption of modern methods of charity and correction, in the application of the best intelligence to the prevention of disease and the amelioration of suffering, Cambridge has been as much a pioneer as in education and religion. The Cambridge Humane Society was one of the eariiest organizations in the world for village improvement and community welfare. It was founded in 1814 under the guidance of Dr. Abiel Holmes. It had a long and honorable career and has now ceased to exist, save as it survives in one of its offshoots, the Female Humane Society. There are now a score or more of vigorous philanthropic agencies at work in Cambridge. The thoroughly organized and efficient Associated Charities date from 1881. The Cambridge Hospital was incorporated in 1871, the Avon Home for Children began in 1874, and the Homes for Aged People a little later. Among the other well-known institutions there should be mentioned such educational and social centers as the Cambridge Social Union, the Prospect Union and the Young Men's and Young Women's Christian Associations; such social settlements as the East End Christian Union, the Neighborhood House, the Margaret Fuller House, the James A. Woolson House and the Riverside House. In recent years there have arisen the Anti-Tuberculosis Association, the Visiting

Nitrsing Association, the Home Savings Association and other vigorous and useful organizations for the prevention or the cure of poverty and sickness. It would be difficult to discover any physical, moral or spiritual need that is unof these was designated simply by the name of the city. The public service corporations are admirably administered. The Boston Elevated Railway Company, whose president General Wm. A. Bancroft is a citizen and former

The banking institutions of Cambridge are numerous and sound. The first bank was chartered in 1826, the first savings bank in 1834, and the first trust company in 1890. Each mayor of Cambridge, furnishes rapid and reliable transportation in and through all parts of the city. The New England Telephone Company provides ample facilities for telephonic communication. The Cambridge Gas Company was organized in 1852 by the same energetic group of men that originated the Street Railway, and has done a large and constantly increasing business. The Cambridge Electric Light Company was incorporated in 1886 and provides an excellent system of illvmiination for the city.

In 1887 Mr. Frederick H. Rindge began a series of gifts to his native city which provide for a noble group of buildings. The first building erected by Mr. Rindge was that for the Public Library, an ample, convenient and beautiful building which houses a large and valuable collection. Mr. Rindge supplemented this gift in the following year by building near the Library a Manual Training School, and later he built on an adjacent lot a large and handsome High School, and then a home for the Latin School. Meanwhile, in 1889, he had further provided for the erection of a beautiful City Hall, a building remarkable for its fine proportions and imposing dignity. Mr. Rindge was a son of Cambridge, but he spent the years of his manhood in California. His gifts were made during the mayoralty of William E. Russell, the brilliant j-oung leader of public opinion, Cambridge born and educated, who was afterwards for three years Governor of Massachusetts, and who, but for his early death, would svirely have risen to still higher places of responsibility and honor in a nation that knows how to secure for its service men of wide vision, integrity of purpose and administrative ability.

In the thirty years between 1880 and 1910 Cambridge again almost exactly doubled in population, a gain chiefly accounted for by an extraordinary increase in the number of families of foreign birth, and even as this book is published two events which foretoken further changes in the aspect and life of Cambridge are taking place. The completion of the subway from Harvard Square to Park Street in Boston, and the consequent rapid transit, will presumably be followed by another rapid increase in population, for Cambridge is the most quickly and easily accessible of all the towns and cities adjacent to Boston; and the purchase by the Massachusetts Institute of Technologyof fifty acres of land on the Charles River embankment and the removal of that great and famous school to Cambridge will both increase the renown of the place as the chief educational center of the country and insirre the rapid development and improvement of all the property on the river front between the Harvard and Cambridge bridges.