From Settlement to City 350 Years of Growing Up

Legends die hard. Most of Cambridge gathers this weekend to celebrate its 350th birthday, but the party actually should have been held last year. Thomas Graves built the first house here in 1629, on a hill in what is now East Cambridge.

Cambridge was born with a silver spoon in its mouth--before the first foundation was dug, its planners had agreed it would serve well as the capital of this infant colony. Deputy Gov. Thomas Dudley and Gov. John Winthrop led the first expedition, described by historian Thomas Wentworth Higginson at the 250th anniversary as a "semi-military picnic." They picked this bend in the Charles for the governmental seat because it seemed far enough inland to be safe from naval attack, but could be easily defended against overland aggression. And they agreed, along with about ten other officers of the colony, that they would build homes there and bring the government with them from Boston.

Cambridge's luck soured--the colonists befriended the Indians, reducing the need for strong fortifications. And Winthrop apparently grew tired of the new town--one historian reports that when two walls of his home, caulked with lime instead of mud, washed out in an October rainstorm, he was unwilling to rebuild, and fled to his Boston residence.

But some of the original settlers, including Dudley, remained, and operated a local government--the first town records include a stern warning to citizens to keep their property in "good and sufficient repair." It also lists Cambridge's first criminals--Knox, of Watertowne, who apparently cut lumber in the town, and Goodman Kinsbury, also of Watertowne, for "encroaching the bounds of this town."

The Watertowne crime wave under control, the government decided in 1635 to run a ferry from the foot of Boylston St. to Boston. A year later, an event of even greater significance to the city's future--the general court decided to build a college in Massachusetts, and as a site chose Cambridge, named for the English college town on a river. With the grant of 2 2/3 acres from the city, Harvard opened a small school to educate the clergy.

The next 100 years of Cambridge history is marked by slow, steady growth. All the land to the east of Quincy and Bow streets, extending through what is now Cambridgeport, was known as The Neck--acres upon acres of pastures, woodlands and marsh used only for farming. And in the other direction, Cambridge was an assortment of far-flung towns. At its greatest length, in 1651, the town was in Higginson's words, "long and thin, as becomes an overgrown youth, measuring 18 miles in length and only a mile in width. It is shaped like a pair of compasses, one leg extending through Arlington, Lexington, Bedford and Billerica," while the other, shorter leg bisected Brighton and Newton. The present Cambridge formed only the head of the compass.

Cambridge shrunk slowly through the century, as townsmen asked for the right to open their own churches, instead of making long trips each Sunday. Newton pulled away in 1662, and Lexington opened its own parish in 1696, but Brighton remained a part of Cambridge until 1779. But as it shrunk in size, Cambridge grew in stature, an increasingly wealthy city that also served as the intellectual capital of the 13 colonies.

The Revolutionary War shook Cambridge out of its tranquillity. When the British troops left Boston for Lexington and Concord, they came by way of Cambridge, landing on Lechmere Point the night of April 18th, 1775. Silently they crept over the causeway (now. Gore St.). Their movement would have gone unnoticed save for one British regular who took sick and found his way to a house near the point. From there, the alarm was given, explaining why the Cambridge militia were among the first aroused.

The Redcoats had to come through Cambridge on their way home as well, except now they ran instead of marching, terrified by the guerilla tactics of the thousands of Americans who kept on their heels. Three Cambridge men were killed in one engagement on the retreat--Moses Richardson, William Marcy and John Hicks were buried in a common grave in the churchyard, a funeral that, as one chronicler put it, "brought the war to our doors."

With the British trapped in Boston, Cambridge became the cork on the bottle. Thousands of colonials poured into the town, sending Harvard to Concord so the College buildings could be used as barracks. But most of the soldiers slept in tents, a sight Emerson described: "Who would have thought, 12 months past, that all Cambridge would be covered with American camps and cut up into forts and entrenchments?... It is very diverting to walk among the camps. They are as different in forms as the owners are in their dress, every tent a portraiture of the temper and tastes of the persons who encamp in it."

George Washington took command soon after the initial fighting, and began fortifying the community. The British kept a steady, but ineffectual, fire trained at the colonials as they dug trenches and built walls. The Americans, too short of ammunition to return the fire, instead chased after errant musket balls to recycle them.

The British left Boston in 1776, and the Revolution shifted to other sections of the newly-united nation. But in October of 1777, Cambridge again played a part, this time less glamorous--after Gen. Burgoyne and 5700 men surrendered at Saratoga, the colonial leaders decided to deport them. While they were waiting for ships home, the men were quartered in Cambridge. Officers lodged with civilians, to the distinct displeasure of some crowded patriots. As the war drew to a close, Massachusetts leaders gathered in Cambridge to draw up the Bay State's constitution, a document that later served as a model for the United States Constitution.

Life returned to peace and profitability in the next few decades, as speculators and developers began to lay the base for the 19th century expansion that should turn Cambridge from a town into a city of the first rank. Andrew Craigie created East Cambridge out of almost nothing, purchasing acres of land through straw buyers on Lechmere Point. The success of his development was assured when he persuaded the county officials, over the loud protests of the "Old Cantabrigians," to move the county buildings to their present location, well out in East Cambridge. And the Neck was slowly being transformed into the Port--though the commercial potential of a big shipping port was never realized, Cambridgeport grew fast enough that Congress made it an official port of entry in January, 1805. The neighborhood's first schoolhouse went up in 1802, a fire company was formed in 1803. By 1806, Cambridgeport had 1000 residents.

But that was only the beginning. From 2,323 persons in 1810, the city grew to 8,409 in 1840. And then, suddenly, population growth mushroomed. A 48-per-cent increase in just five years, to 12,490 in 1845, was only the start; by 1900, the total had doubled three times, and 100,000 lived in Cambridge.

The cause of the boom was not more babies; it was more immigrants. S.B. Sutton reports that the voting list in 1822 contained 481 names, of which only four sounded even "vaguely foreign." Even as late as 1848, only 25 names sounded foreign, but by 1855 there were 1420 Irish and 587 Scots here. The Irish had begun settling in 1830, and after the potato famine their ranks swelled. By 1880, there were at least 15,000 first-generation immigrants, including 8366 from Ireland, 3981 from Canada and the West Indies, 1396 from England, 636 from Germany, 169 from Sweden and 36 from Italy.

Fitting in was hard for them. Sutton says the Yankees "automatically assigned the Irish to the bottom of the social heap," treating the Black population with greater deference. But the immigrant influx turned Cambridge into a manufacturing power--the more the factories expanded, the more immigrants arrived, and vice-versa. In 1845, there were 94 manufacturing firms in the city. Twenty years later, that number had grown to 173, and 20 years still later, in 1885, there were 578 factories in the city. From a work-force of 1269 in 1845, the number of employees grew to 14,258 by 1890.

One reason for the expansion, which occurred mainly in East Cambridge and Cambridgeport, was a lack of unions. The natural distrust of the divergent nationalities, combined with an easily accessible competing labor pool in Boston, discouraged organized labor--many strikes were launched and only a very few succeeded. The growth transformed Cambridgeport from "a homogeneous New England village to the beginning of a highly cosmopolitan industrial area. Its biggest industries were high class--the Riverside Press, the Athenaum Press, and Little, Brown and Co. publishers. The one factory that wasn't producing books--Mason and Hamlin Co.,--turned out pianos.

In East Cambridge, the industry was more diverse, but the John P. Squire, meat-packer, was clearly dominant. The company eventually encompassed 22 acres, on which 2500 hogs a day were slaughtered. The glass industry, which once dominated the area, moved out in the 1800s, but there were plenty of factories left--Revere Sugar, Goepper Brothers, which produced barrels, the American Net and Twine Co., Dow fertilizer, even Lockhart & Co., manufacturers of caskets. By 1846, East Cambridge had 4000 people, "a healthy balance of commerce, industry and professionalism, no one activity dominating the others," according to one historian.

North Cambridge, though it didn't grow as fast as the neighborhoods to the east, got its start in the 1830s when a cattle market settled there, soon spawning a stockyard, inns, taverns, and even a racetrack. Water shortages prevented much native industry from springing up, except for brickmaking concerns, which benefited from the clay in the soil.

In the midst of its growth spurt, Cambridge officially became a city. Over the protests of many upper-crust Cantabrigians, all the communities were officially joined. But, to borrow a phrase from Sutton, "the joining was strictly contractual, rather like a pre-arranged marriage of convenience in which the partners shared little love and continued to sleep in separate bedrooms." Actually, there was comparatively little for government to do--this was a boom era, and local government simply did not enact zoning regulations. It also refrained from planning, and even building codes were rudimentary. The look-the-other-way policy permitted fast economic growth, so fast, indeed, that the 1873-78 depression was scarcely felt in the city.

But by the end of the century, most of the city's territory had been developed, and the residents had noticed that Harvard occupied a lot of land, which could neither be used for factories nor taxed. Harvard knew its non-profit status was vital and tried to discourage the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from moving across the river from its Boston home, fearing that the new school would focus attention on the property tax issue and endanger Harvard's exemption. But MIT still moved--in 1916, with the president and trustees aboard the good ship Bucentaur, it ceremonially crossed the Charles into Cambridge.

Soon after, World War I, which drew 800 Cambridge men into uniform, had more effect on Harvard than MIT. Harvard was largely turned over to the Naval Radio School.

With the '20s came a new age of bureaucratic progressivism. The Planning Board, largely advisory when formed in 1913, conducted a number of studies in the '20s. And the building code adopted in 1924 included zoning power for the city government.

The next step for the city government, which had been dominated by the Irish for several generations, came in the late 1930s when reformers began to press for more professionalism. Their vehicle was "Plan E"--a city manager form of government with a weak mayor, citywide elections, and an incredibly complicated "proportional representation" system of voting. They lost their first campaign in 1938 but won in 1940 (perhaps aided by Mayor John L. Lyons, who--once asked about snowplows--said "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.") The first few Plan E elections established the power of the Cambridge Civic Association and the Brattle St. Old Cantabrigians.

World War II affected Cambridge more than most cities. About 15,000 Cantabrigians donned uniforms (401 were killed), and strong links between the universities and Washington were developed. Ever since, the Charles-Potomac shuffle has been routine for the brain trust of Cambridge.

Meanwhile, all the Northeast, including Cambridge, suffered as industry went South in search of cheap, unorganized labor. The exodus to the suburbs also shrunk Cambridge from a population peak of nearly 130,000 to about 100,000. But Cambridge fared better than many other cities; MIT and Harvard attracted a number of electronics, engineering and research and development firms to help ease the sudden loss of jobs.

The '50s were comparatively uneventful--Sen. Joseph McCarthy referred to Harvard as a "smelly mess," and the most serious trouble came when The Crimson championed Pogofor president in 1952, and a campaign rally set off a night of nasty fighting between students and police.

All that changed, in Cambridge and nearly every other college town, in the '60s, as U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War triggered a rising crescendo of student protest. The anti-war sentiment spread from campus to city--though voters in 1967 defeated a ballot referendum urging a quick withdrawal, the city council by 1969 went on record asking for the return of U.S. troops to these shores.

Conflict escalated both in Southeast Asia and at home. by spring 1969, Harvard students were no longer content with messages of support from the City Council. Members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) captured University Hall, the campus' main administration building, and stayed there overnight until a coalition of police from Cambridge, neighboring towns, and the state evicted them in a bloody roust that set off a massive student strike. By the summer of 1970, the violence had proliferated, and protesters smashed windows and set fires throughout Harvard Square.

One student demand in the 1969 strike was an end to University evictions of city tenants; the demand reflected the increasing crisis in housing that in 1970 led the City Council to enact rent control legislation while hundreds of partisans looked on.

Attempts have already been made to write the Cambridge history of the 1980s. Officials hope to attract large-scale economic develpment, and some predict Cambridge will become an industrial city again. Other problems have not disappeared--rent control seems only to have whetted the appetite of landlords for turning their apartments into condominiums and high-priced cooperatives, and the city is attempting to stabilize the market with legal barriers to change.

But guesswork, if history be any guide, is unlikely to be productive. After all, Thomas Graves would never recognize the wilderness where he built his house.Police clashed with student anti-war protesters throughout the late '60s and early '70s. The violence flared in the summer of 1970.