CHANGES

As we daily risk life and limb crossing Massachusetts Avenue to catch a subway train "in town" we are likely to take this Cambridge of ours very much for granted. But at this time of anniversary celebrations it is instructive and amusing to glance at the past. Cambridge, even, was young once!

The year 1630 saw the erection of the two houses which formed the settlement called "Newtowne". By the end of the century, Brattle Street, known as "Greek Lane", was already reaching out, the inhabitants thereof were envied for their reputed wealth; the colony had awarded Harvard College an endowment of 400 pounds and two of the regicides lived there long enough to teach the natives some new foreign oaths!

Revolutionary times and sentiments cast Brattle Street, now "Tory Row" into great disfavor. False alarms in April, 1776, sent citizens in wild flight to "a place called fresh pond" to escape a rumored attack by British troops on the town and college, that "hotbed of rebellion". As we all know, the few college buildings became barracks, while professors and students sought what quiet they might find at Concord.

With peace college and town grew together. In 1846 bells and cannon proclaimed the granting of the city charter. Checked only by the Civil War with its toll of four hundred dead, prosperity advanced steadily to the present day Cambridge of the locked Charles, the subway, and the Waldorf.