Cambridge--1937 Book Introduction
Mar. 21st, 2012 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
earlgreytea68Ages and ages and ages and ages ago, the very first motor tour I ever did was the Cambridge motor tour. Sadly for all of us, in between then and now some strange thing happened with my LJ and photos got lost. I mean, *I* still have all the photos, and if I ever move these musings over to a proper blog, I’ll fix these entries, but, in the meantime, you can read the text from the Cambridge motor tour, but you can’t actually see any of the photographs. Sad.
Anyway, I started the Cambridge motor tour without ever telling any of you Facts About Cambridge! And I know you’re waiting eagerly for them! So here they are!
It has an altitude that is all of 9 miles above sea level. It was settled in 1630, incorporated as a town in 1636, and named a city in 1846. In 1937, its population was 118,075 people and it boasted five hotels “and a large number of certified tourist homes.” Swimming was allowed at Magazine Beach (I have never heard of this place) and on Memorial Drive (who in their right mind would swim in the Charles these days? Ah, 1937 was such an innocent time!). And every year, on April 19, the ride of William Dawes used to be reenacted. I know there are still reenactments on Patriots’ Day, but I can’t remember if “William Dawes” still rides through Cambridge or not.
The 1937 book loftily states that Cambridge is in fact four cities: “Here in elm-shaded streets, in fenced dooryards and landmarks that preserve treasured memories, still live Old Cambridge and that second Cambridge which succeeded it, the Home of the Literati. And here, visible in contemporaneous lost existence, are two other cities: the University City and one other—the Unknown City.” I have not yet been able to ascertain who the anonymous author of the 1937 book is. However, I’d put money on him being a Harvard alum. The way he talks about Cambridge is affectionate to the point of adoring, doubtless influenced by nostalgia. And here is how he describes the university: “Harvard Yard is a hive of learning vaster than any Tibetan monastery.” That is the University City. The Unknown City is apparently everyone else living in Cambridge. Oh, and its manufacturing, which at the time was the third most valuable by output in all of New England (behind Boston and Providence).
Cambridge was founded in 1630 as a fortified stronghold against…London. Yup, apparently there was fear that Boston and its harbor would be too accessible to King Charles’s warships, so they forged a bit inland, to a place they originally called New Towne. “Great pains were taken in laying out and building the ‘New Towne,’” according to the book. Fascinating because these days Cambridge is such a maze of streets that one cannot discern any rhyme or reason. It was, however, apparently from the very beginning an extremely elite place, full of beautiful houses owned by rich people. (The magic influence of the “University City” has continuously kept Cambridge affluent and smug and self-contained in a way different from anyplace else I’ve ever been. When I first lived there, I was befuddled by it. Then I moved away and realized it’s kind of my favorite place in the universe, yes, even over Boston. It just…is itself in such an assured and infuriating way.)
In 1635, a group of elders met and voted to condemn Anne Hutchinson and about eighty other people “for opinions ‘some blasphemous, others erroneous, all unsound’” (most of them amounting to the idea that Boston’s clergy were not, in fact, the recipients of divine inspiration the way they claimed). The condemnation was led by Rev. Mr. Shepard of New Towne. A year later, in October 1636, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony voted to use the entirety of the colony’s tax collections that year (400 pounds) to establish a college, and Cotton Mather chose New Towne as the site of the college “because it was ‘under the soul-ravishing ministry of Mr. Thomas Shepard.’”
Meanwhile, in Charlestown lived “a young dissenting minister” named John Harvard. Right around this time of great decision-making, he died and left his library and half of his estate to the future college (a sum totaling around 1,700 pounds). The decision was made to call the college Harvard in his honor, and the name of New Towne was changed to Cambridge, to mimic the “Old English University town.”
At some point after that, the “Cambridge Platform” was entered, in which “Church and State were united by law, and the rule of the clergy was made absolute.” Despite the existence of the Cambridge Platform, “there shortly appeared in Boston ‘an accursed and pernicious sect of heretics lately risen up in the world, who are commonly called Quakers.’ The plague spread, and the horrified people of Cambridge beheld Elizabeth Horton passing through the streets crying, ‘Repentance! Repentance! A day of howling and sad lamentation is coming upon you from the Lord!’” Apparently, the messages that assault you in Harvard Square have been the same for nearly 400 years.
Poor Elizabeth was arrested, flogged, and cast out into the woods. Presumably she dies, although the 1937 book does not tell us her fate. Nor does it really tell us the point of this story. It sums up as follows: “The Devil, however, continued to afflict Old Cambridge; and the Mathers, father and son, as God’s appointed judges, jousted vigorously with him.” I’d pay money to see the Devil and Cotton Mather jousting, I think.
The description of early Harvard is so comically unlike the Harvard I came to know that it’s fantastic: “At Harvard, Bible study was most important. The student was expected to live under a monastic code. The main aim of his life was ‘to know God and Jesus Christ.’ All his acts were performed under the vigilant eye of the Town Watch. He was to read the Scriptures twice a day, and not to ‘intrude or inter-meddle on other men’s affairs.’ He could not ‘buy, sell, or exchange anything above the value of a sixpence,’ nor could he use tobacco without permission of the president or prescription of a physician, and then only ‘in a sober and private manner.’”
Nevertheless, Harvard students are Harvard students are Harvard students, even in the 1600s, and the early students were known for “'willfulle heresie.’” Even one of its early presidents was removed from his office for speaking out against infant baptism. Somehow, in the eyes of the 1937 book, this led directly to the College being in “a sad state of decay” by the beginning of the 1700s, with few students, “dilapidated” buildings, and less than a thousand pounds in endowment. (At the risk of willful heresy: My God, how times have changed…)
At the dawning of the eighteenth century, less than 250 people lived in Cambridge, and bears still roamed through the town. “But the town had its elegant sophistication.” Brattle Street was populated by “luxurious estates” that were known as Tory Row (incidentally, the name of a bar in Harvard Square these days), owned by families whose names are familiar to Bostonians: Inman, Ruggles, Lechmere, etc.
Despite Tory Row, Cambridge was a good revolutionary town in the grand New England tradition, the book is quick to assure us. In 1768, Cambridge sent two delegates to Faneuil Hall in Boston, in protest of the Crown’s policies. On March 8, 1770, Cambridge’s meeting house tolled its bell in honor of the burial of the victims of the Boston Massacre (Charlestown and Roxbury also tolled their bells during the funeral procession; I never knew this). In 1772, with revolution looming, the Tory Wiliam Brattle fought against the organization of a war committee in Cambridge. He lost. The night after the Boston Tea Party, thousands gathered around Cambridge’s courthouse to force the resignation of the Crown’s officials, including the High Sheriff and the Judges.
On the evening of April 19, 1775, a group of British soldiers had dinner in Cambridge. This, according to the 1937 book, “arous[ed] great suspicion. That night, hoofbeats echoed in the frosty air.” Paul Revere, and William Dawes. It was Dawes who rode into Cambridge (to this day, there’s a park called William Dawes Park that commemorates the route he took). He roused the town, and the women and children were sent to Fresh Pond so as to be out of the path of the British Army (SKETCHIEST PLACE IN ALL OF CAMBRIDGE. Apparently, this was not so in 1775…). Meanwhile, the Minutemen marched toward Cambridge. By the end of that fateful week, roughly 20,000 men had assembled in Cambridge, and it was made the headquarters of the first American army (a position it held for a year). Cambridge Common was apparently the site where the army camped. It’s loaded with plaques about all this.
The Battle of Bunker Hill was fought in June 1775. Shortly afterward, General George Washington, the newly commissioned Commander of the American Army, arrived at Cambridge Common to assume his command. Another plaque on the Common commemorates what it purports is the exact spot where this happened, on July 3, 1775. A crow’s-nest was built in one of the Cambridge Common trees, and from there Washington kept tabs on the surrounding country.
On January 1, 1776, the new flag of thirteen strips was flown for the first time over the Common. And, on March 2, 1776, Washington and the American army began bombarding British-occupied Boston with cannon and mortar. On March 17, the British abandoned the city, a day still memorialized in Boston as “Evacuation Day.” (Or St. Patrick’s Day, I guess, given how it’s usually celebrated…). With Boston back in American hands, Washington departed for New York, and Cambridge military importance ended.
When the revolution ended, Cambridge found itself “the epitome of American culture even by critical European intellectuals.” Its second chapter began: “Home of the Literati.” Oliver Wendell Holmes embarked upon his literary career from the comfortable seat of Cambridge. As did Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a professor of modern languages at Harvard. (Longfellow, incidentally, was apparently so beloved in his day that the children of Cambridge raised money to provide him with an armchair. I guess he really needed one?) James Russell Lowell, another Harvard professor, wrote poems, something called “Biglow Papers,” and got himself appointed as U.S. Ambassador to Spain and then the Court of St. James’s, where “his popularity was tremendous in literary circles.” Cambridge writers dominated the books and journals of the day, led by the famous Transcendental Club. (Ugh, Transcendentalists, I hate the Transcendentalists, they were so boring, and their name is so long.)
By the end of the eighteenth century, Harvard boasted 500 students, and almost everyone in Cambridge was in the business of tending to the needs of the students in some way. The mutual dependency of the town and its university had begun.
“One evening in 1878, Dr. Gilman, a noted teacher, historian, and author, invited Prof. Greenough and his wife to come to his house to talk over a very important matter, namely, the foundation of a college for women.” Hahahahahaha! That sentence cracks me up.
A year later, a group of Harvard professors joined together informally to begin providing instruction to women. The informal arrangement grew until it became a college called Radcliffe, joined with Harvard in 1894 and named for Ann Radcliffe of England, who established Harvard’s first scholarship fund. For many years, however, Radcliffe was simply known as “Harvard Annex,” “and serious qualms were felt by the respectable citizenry of Cambridge at the idea of ‘hosts of young women walking unescorted through the town.’”
In 1937, Radcliffe had its own President and its diplomas were all co-signed by the President of Harvard to show Harvard’s blessing of Radcliffe’s educational standards. I actually don’t know how the Harvard-Radcliffe relationship works these days.
In 1916, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded. It was apparently founded thus: “Late one August afternoon, a procession, its members clad as Venetian sailors and led by a marshal in the crimson and velvet of a Doge, moved slowly to the river edge in Boston. Followed by a group of men in gowns and crimson hoods, and bearing a great gilded and ornamental chest containing charter and archives, the solemn procession moved forward. They were met by a Venetian barge, which, under the eyes of ten thousand spectators, bore them away to the other shore.” I…don’t know what to make of this. I guess it’s the famous MIT sense of humor, present even on the very first day?
And then there is the Industrial City, aka the Unknown City, in the parlance of the 1937 book. The book tells us a number of stories about Cambridge industrialists: A boy walked 90 miles from New Hampshire to make his fortune making soap. A 16-year-old cook from Nova Scotia arrived in Cambridge with so little money that he had to pay the toll to get into the city with a lead pencil, and became a highly-successful coffin-maker. Little and Brown and Henry O. Houghton founded publishing houses (no interesting facts shared about them, but at least we get their names).
Interesting fact that I learned from this book: Fresh Pond, which is today the home of the World’s Sketchiest Movie Theater and is generally unattractive in a way that seems completely unlike the postcard that is the rest of Cambridge, used to be the center of the country’s ice trade. Who knew? Cambridge was also the home of the country’s first ladder company, the first galvanized iron pipe, the first piano key manufacturers, and the first mechanical egg-beaters. Cambridge also “perfected” flowerpots (apparently flowerpots left much to be desired before Cambridge cracked the code?) and gave the world “famous reversible collars” and waterproof hats. So, huzzah for Cambridge, I suppose.
Anyway, I started the Cambridge motor tour without ever telling any of you Facts About Cambridge! And I know you’re waiting eagerly for them! So here they are!
It has an altitude that is all of 9 miles above sea level. It was settled in 1630, incorporated as a town in 1636, and named a city in 1846. In 1937, its population was 118,075 people and it boasted five hotels “and a large number of certified tourist homes.” Swimming was allowed at Magazine Beach (I have never heard of this place) and on Memorial Drive (who in their right mind would swim in the Charles these days? Ah, 1937 was such an innocent time!). And every year, on April 19, the ride of William Dawes used to be reenacted. I know there are still reenactments on Patriots’ Day, but I can’t remember if “William Dawes” still rides through Cambridge or not.
The 1937 book loftily states that Cambridge is in fact four cities: “Here in elm-shaded streets, in fenced dooryards and landmarks that preserve treasured memories, still live Old Cambridge and that second Cambridge which succeeded it, the Home of the Literati. And here, visible in contemporaneous lost existence, are two other cities: the University City and one other—the Unknown City.” I have not yet been able to ascertain who the anonymous author of the 1937 book is. However, I’d put money on him being a Harvard alum. The way he talks about Cambridge is affectionate to the point of adoring, doubtless influenced by nostalgia. And here is how he describes the university: “Harvard Yard is a hive of learning vaster than any Tibetan monastery.” That is the University City. The Unknown City is apparently everyone else living in Cambridge. Oh, and its manufacturing, which at the time was the third most valuable by output in all of New England (behind Boston and Providence).
Cambridge was founded in 1630 as a fortified stronghold against…London. Yup, apparently there was fear that Boston and its harbor would be too accessible to King Charles’s warships, so they forged a bit inland, to a place they originally called New Towne. “Great pains were taken in laying out and building the ‘New Towne,’” according to the book. Fascinating because these days Cambridge is such a maze of streets that one cannot discern any rhyme or reason. It was, however, apparently from the very beginning an extremely elite place, full of beautiful houses owned by rich people. (The magic influence of the “University City” has continuously kept Cambridge affluent and smug and self-contained in a way different from anyplace else I’ve ever been. When I first lived there, I was befuddled by it. Then I moved away and realized it’s kind of my favorite place in the universe, yes, even over Boston. It just…is itself in such an assured and infuriating way.)
In 1635, a group of elders met and voted to condemn Anne Hutchinson and about eighty other people “for opinions ‘some blasphemous, others erroneous, all unsound’” (most of them amounting to the idea that Boston’s clergy were not, in fact, the recipients of divine inspiration the way they claimed). The condemnation was led by Rev. Mr. Shepard of New Towne. A year later, in October 1636, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony voted to use the entirety of the colony’s tax collections that year (400 pounds) to establish a college, and Cotton Mather chose New Towne as the site of the college “because it was ‘under the soul-ravishing ministry of Mr. Thomas Shepard.’”
Meanwhile, in Charlestown lived “a young dissenting minister” named John Harvard. Right around this time of great decision-making, he died and left his library and half of his estate to the future college (a sum totaling around 1,700 pounds). The decision was made to call the college Harvard in his honor, and the name of New Towne was changed to Cambridge, to mimic the “Old English University town.”
At some point after that, the “Cambridge Platform” was entered, in which “Church and State were united by law, and the rule of the clergy was made absolute.” Despite the existence of the Cambridge Platform, “there shortly appeared in Boston ‘an accursed and pernicious sect of heretics lately risen up in the world, who are commonly called Quakers.’ The plague spread, and the horrified people of Cambridge beheld Elizabeth Horton passing through the streets crying, ‘Repentance! Repentance! A day of howling and sad lamentation is coming upon you from the Lord!’” Apparently, the messages that assault you in Harvard Square have been the same for nearly 400 years.
Poor Elizabeth was arrested, flogged, and cast out into the woods. Presumably she dies, although the 1937 book does not tell us her fate. Nor does it really tell us the point of this story. It sums up as follows: “The Devil, however, continued to afflict Old Cambridge; and the Mathers, father and son, as God’s appointed judges, jousted vigorously with him.” I’d pay money to see the Devil and Cotton Mather jousting, I think.
The description of early Harvard is so comically unlike the Harvard I came to know that it’s fantastic: “At Harvard, Bible study was most important. The student was expected to live under a monastic code. The main aim of his life was ‘to know God and Jesus Christ.’ All his acts were performed under the vigilant eye of the Town Watch. He was to read the Scriptures twice a day, and not to ‘intrude or inter-meddle on other men’s affairs.’ He could not ‘buy, sell, or exchange anything above the value of a sixpence,’ nor could he use tobacco without permission of the president or prescription of a physician, and then only ‘in a sober and private manner.’”
Nevertheless, Harvard students are Harvard students are Harvard students, even in the 1600s, and the early students were known for “'willfulle heresie.’” Even one of its early presidents was removed from his office for speaking out against infant baptism. Somehow, in the eyes of the 1937 book, this led directly to the College being in “a sad state of decay” by the beginning of the 1700s, with few students, “dilapidated” buildings, and less than a thousand pounds in endowment. (At the risk of willful heresy: My God, how times have changed…)
At the dawning of the eighteenth century, less than 250 people lived in Cambridge, and bears still roamed through the town. “But the town had its elegant sophistication.” Brattle Street was populated by “luxurious estates” that were known as Tory Row (incidentally, the name of a bar in Harvard Square these days), owned by families whose names are familiar to Bostonians: Inman, Ruggles, Lechmere, etc.
Despite Tory Row, Cambridge was a good revolutionary town in the grand New England tradition, the book is quick to assure us. In 1768, Cambridge sent two delegates to Faneuil Hall in Boston, in protest of the Crown’s policies. On March 8, 1770, Cambridge’s meeting house tolled its bell in honor of the burial of the victims of the Boston Massacre (Charlestown and Roxbury also tolled their bells during the funeral procession; I never knew this). In 1772, with revolution looming, the Tory Wiliam Brattle fought against the organization of a war committee in Cambridge. He lost. The night after the Boston Tea Party, thousands gathered around Cambridge’s courthouse to force the resignation of the Crown’s officials, including the High Sheriff and the Judges.
On the evening of April 19, 1775, a group of British soldiers had dinner in Cambridge. This, according to the 1937 book, “arous[ed] great suspicion. That night, hoofbeats echoed in the frosty air.” Paul Revere, and William Dawes. It was Dawes who rode into Cambridge (to this day, there’s a park called William Dawes Park that commemorates the route he took). He roused the town, and the women and children were sent to Fresh Pond so as to be out of the path of the British Army (SKETCHIEST PLACE IN ALL OF CAMBRIDGE. Apparently, this was not so in 1775…). Meanwhile, the Minutemen marched toward Cambridge. By the end of that fateful week, roughly 20,000 men had assembled in Cambridge, and it was made the headquarters of the first American army (a position it held for a year). Cambridge Common was apparently the site where the army camped. It’s loaded with plaques about all this.
The Battle of Bunker Hill was fought in June 1775. Shortly afterward, General George Washington, the newly commissioned Commander of the American Army, arrived at Cambridge Common to assume his command. Another plaque on the Common commemorates what it purports is the exact spot where this happened, on July 3, 1775. A crow’s-nest was built in one of the Cambridge Common trees, and from there Washington kept tabs on the surrounding country.
On January 1, 1776, the new flag of thirteen strips was flown for the first time over the Common. And, on March 2, 1776, Washington and the American army began bombarding British-occupied Boston with cannon and mortar. On March 17, the British abandoned the city, a day still memorialized in Boston as “Evacuation Day.” (Or St. Patrick’s Day, I guess, given how it’s usually celebrated…). With Boston back in American hands, Washington departed for New York, and Cambridge military importance ended.
When the revolution ended, Cambridge found itself “the epitome of American culture even by critical European intellectuals.” Its second chapter began: “Home of the Literati.” Oliver Wendell Holmes embarked upon his literary career from the comfortable seat of Cambridge. As did Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a professor of modern languages at Harvard. (Longfellow, incidentally, was apparently so beloved in his day that the children of Cambridge raised money to provide him with an armchair. I guess he really needed one?) James Russell Lowell, another Harvard professor, wrote poems, something called “Biglow Papers,” and got himself appointed as U.S. Ambassador to Spain and then the Court of St. James’s, where “his popularity was tremendous in literary circles.” Cambridge writers dominated the books and journals of the day, led by the famous Transcendental Club. (Ugh, Transcendentalists, I hate the Transcendentalists, they were so boring, and their name is so long.)
By the end of the eighteenth century, Harvard boasted 500 students, and almost everyone in Cambridge was in the business of tending to the needs of the students in some way. The mutual dependency of the town and its university had begun.
“One evening in 1878, Dr. Gilman, a noted teacher, historian, and author, invited Prof. Greenough and his wife to come to his house to talk over a very important matter, namely, the foundation of a college for women.” Hahahahahaha! That sentence cracks me up.
A year later, a group of Harvard professors joined together informally to begin providing instruction to women. The informal arrangement grew until it became a college called Radcliffe, joined with Harvard in 1894 and named for Ann Radcliffe of England, who established Harvard’s first scholarship fund. For many years, however, Radcliffe was simply known as “Harvard Annex,” “and serious qualms were felt by the respectable citizenry of Cambridge at the idea of ‘hosts of young women walking unescorted through the town.’”
In 1937, Radcliffe had its own President and its diplomas were all co-signed by the President of Harvard to show Harvard’s blessing of Radcliffe’s educational standards. I actually don’t know how the Harvard-Radcliffe relationship works these days.
In 1916, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded. It was apparently founded thus: “Late one August afternoon, a procession, its members clad as Venetian sailors and led by a marshal in the crimson and velvet of a Doge, moved slowly to the river edge in Boston. Followed by a group of men in gowns and crimson hoods, and bearing a great gilded and ornamental chest containing charter and archives, the solemn procession moved forward. They were met by a Venetian barge, which, under the eyes of ten thousand spectators, bore them away to the other shore.” I…don’t know what to make of this. I guess it’s the famous MIT sense of humor, present even on the very first day?
And then there is the Industrial City, aka the Unknown City, in the parlance of the 1937 book. The book tells us a number of stories about Cambridge industrialists: A boy walked 90 miles from New Hampshire to make his fortune making soap. A 16-year-old cook from Nova Scotia arrived in Cambridge with so little money that he had to pay the toll to get into the city with a lead pencil, and became a highly-successful coffin-maker. Little and Brown and Henry O. Houghton founded publishing houses (no interesting facts shared about them, but at least we get their names).
Interesting fact that I learned from this book: Fresh Pond, which is today the home of the World’s Sketchiest Movie Theater and is generally unattractive in a way that seems completely unlike the postcard that is the rest of Cambridge, used to be the center of the country’s ice trade. Who knew? Cambridge was also the home of the country’s first ladder company, the first galvanized iron pipe, the first piano key manufacturers, and the first mechanical egg-beaters. Cambridge also “perfected” flowerpots (apparently flowerpots left much to be desired before Cambridge cracked the code?) and gave the world “famous reversible collars” and waterproof hats. So, huzzah for Cambridge, I suppose.
