Into the history of the town of Cambridge during the two centuries after it received its name I do not propose to enter. But a glimpse of its general appearance during the greater part of that period is needful, in order to give precision and the right sort of emphasis to the contrast which we see before us to-day. The Cambridge of those days was simply the seat of the college, not yet developed into a university. Within the memory of persons now living, Old Cambridge was commonly alluded to as "the village." In the original laying out of the township we seem to see a reminiscence of the ancient threefold partition into town mark, arable mark, and common. The "east gate," near the corner of Harvard and Linden streets, and the "west gate," at the corner of Ash and Brattle, marked the limits of the town in those directions. The town was at first comprised between Harvard Street and the marshes which cut off approach to the river bank. Afterward, the "West End," from Harvard Square to Sparks Street, was gradually covered with homesteads. The common began, as now, hard by God's Acre, the venerable burying ground, and afforded pasturage for the village cattle as far as Linnæan Street. The regions now occupied by Cambridgeport and East Cambridge contained the arable district with many farms, small and large, but everywhere salt marshes bordered the river, and much of the country was a wild woodland. The tale of wolves killed in Cambridge for the year 1696 was seventy-six, and a bear was seen roaming as late as 1754. It was a rough country which the British first encountered when they landed at Lechmere Point in 1775, on their night march to Lexington. Cambridge then turned its back toward Boston, to which the only approach was by a causeway and bridge at what we now call Boylston Street, and by this route the distance was eight miles, as we still read upon the ancient milestone in God's Acre. To complete our outline of the village, we must recall the principal public buildings. The meetinghouse, a little south of the site of Dane Hall, was used both as church and as townhouse until 1708, when a building was erected in the middle of Harvard Square to serve for town meetings and courts. A little eastward, near the "east gate," stood the parsonage. The schoolhouse was behind the site of Holyoke House. The jail stood on then west side of Winthrop Square, which was then an open market. Between this market and Harvard Square, in the sanded parlour of the Blue Anchor Tavern, then selectmen held their meetings; and on the corner of the street which still bears the name of Harvard's first president was something rarely to be seen in so small a village, the printing press now known as the University Press, established in 1639,—the only one in English America until Boston followed the example in 1676.
Until the beginning of the present century these outlines of Cambridge remained with but little change, save for the building of noble houses on spacious estates toward Mount Auburn in one direction, and upon Dana Hill in the other. The occupants of many of these estates were members of the Church of England, and the building of Christ Church in 1759 was one marked symptom of the change that was creeping over the little Puritan community. It was a change toward somewhat wider views of life, and toward the softening of old animosities. In contrast with the age in which we live the whole eighteenth century in New England seems a slow and quiet time, when the public pulse beat more languidly, or at any rate less feverishly, than now. The people of New England led a comparatively isolated life.
Thought in our college town did not keep pace with European centres of thought, as it does in our day. There was less hospitality toward foreign ideas. Few people visited Europe. Life in New England was thrown upon its own resources, and this was in great measure true of Cambridge in the days when it was eight miles from Boston, and indefinitely remote from the mother country. One of the surest results of social isolation is the acquirement of peculiarities of speech, often shown in the retaining of archaisms which fashionable language had dropped. That quaint Yankee dialect, of which Hosea Biglow says that,
"For puttin' in a downright lick
'Twixt Humbug's eyes, ther's few can metch it,
An' then it helves my thoughts ez slick
Ez stret-grained hickory doos a hetchet,"—
that dialect so sweet to the ears of every true child of New England may still be heard, if we go to seek it; but in Lowell's boyhood it must have been a familiar sound in the neighbourhood of Elmwood.
But the work done in this rustic college community, if done within somewhat narrow horizons, was eminently a widening and liberalizing work. The seeds of the nineteenth century were germinating in the eighteenth. Two or three indications must suffice, out of many that might be cited. In 1669 there was a schism in the First Parish of Boston, brought about by an attempt to revise the conditions of church membership, in order to obviate some of the difficulties arising from the restriction of the suffrage to church members, and the founding of the Old South Church by the more liberal party was a result of this schism. One hundred and sixty years later, in 1829, there was a schism in the First Parish of Cambridge, which resulted in the founding of the Shepard Church by the more conservative party. The questions at issue between the two parties were the questions that divide Unitarian theology from Trinitarian, and the distance between the kind of interests at stake in the earlier controversy and in the later may serve as a fair measure of the progress which the mind of Massachusetts had been making during that interval of a hundred and sixty years. In all that time, the chief training school for the ministers by whom the speculative minds of Massachusetts were stimulated and guided was Harvard College. But it was here, too, that men eminent in civic life were trained; and among the various illustrations of the type thus nurtured may be cited Samuel Adams and Thomas Hutchinson, foemen worthy of one another, Warren and Hancock, Jonathan Trumbull and John Adams. So far as New England was concerned, the chief work in bringing on the Revolution was done by graduates of Harvard. In the convention which framed our Federal Constitution, three important delegates were the Harvard men, Gerry, Strong, and King; and in this connection we cannot fail to recall names so closely associated with our national beginnings as Timothy Pickering and Fisher Ames, nor can we omit the noble line of jurists from Parsons to Story, and so on to Curtis, whom so many of us well remember; or, going back to that Massachusetts convention, of which the work is commemorated in the name of Federal Street, we may single out for mention the great minister and statesman, type of what is best in Puritanism, Samuel West, of New Bedford. Such names speak for the kind of quiet, unobtrusive work that was going on in Cambridge during those two centuries of rural existence. Such strengthening and unfolding of the spirit is the only work that is truly immortal. In a town like ours the material relics of the past are inspiring, and it is right that we should do our best to preserve them; but they are perishable. The gambrel-roofed house from the door of which President Langdon asked God's blessing upon the men that were starting for Bunker Hill, in later days the birthplace and homestead of our beloved Autocrat, has vanished from the scene; the venerable elm under which Washington drew the sword in defence of American liberty is slowly dying, year by year. But for the spiritual achievement that has marked the career of our community there is no death, and they that have turned many to righteousness shall shine in our firmament as the stars forever and ever.
In contrasting the Cambridge of the nineteenth with that of the two preceding centuries, the first fact which strikes our attention is the increase in the rate of growth. In 1680 the population of Cambridge seems to have been about 850, and the graduating class for that year numbered five. In 1793 the population—not counting the parishes that have since become Brighton and Arlington—was about 1200, and there was a graduating class of 38. Thus in more than a century the population had increased barely fifty per cent. In 1793 there were only four houses east of Dana Street, but that year witnessed an event of cardinal importance, the opening of West Boston Bridge. The distance between Boston and Old Cambridge was thus reduced from eight miles to three, and a direct avenue was opened between the interior of Middlesex County and the Boston markets. The effect was shown in doubling the population of Cambridge by the year 1809, when another bridge was completed from Lechmere Point to the north end of Boston. These were toll bridges, in the hands of private corporations, and their success led to further bridges,—the one at River Street in 1811, the one at Western Avenue in 1825, and Brookline Bridge so lately as 1850. The principal thoroughfares south and east of Old Cambridge were built as highways connecting with these bridges: thus River Street and Western Avenue were tributary to West Boston Bridge, and to that point the Concord Turnpike was prolonged by Broadway, the Middlesex Turnpike by Hampshire Street, and the Medford Road by Webster Avenue; while Cambridge Street, intersecting these avenues, formed a direct thoroughfare from the Concord and Watertown roads to the northern part of Boston. The completion of these important works led to projects for filling up the marshes and establishing docks in rivalry of Boston,—plans but very slightly realized before circumstances essentially changed them.
In this way, Cambridge, which had hitherto faced the Brighton mainland, turned its face toward the Boston peninsula, and two new villages began to grow up at "the Port" and "the Point," otherwise Cambridgeport and East Cambridge. It was not long before the new villages began in some ways to assert rivalry with the old one. The corporation which owned the bridge and large tracts of land at Lechmere Point naturally wished to increase the value of its real estate. Middlesex County needed a new courthouse and jail. In 1757 a new courthouse had been built on the site of Lyceum Hall, but in 1813 there was a need for something better; whereupon the Lechmere Point Corporation forthwith built a courthouse and jail in East Cambridge, and presented them, with the ground on which they stood, to the county. In 1818, a lot of land in the Port, bounded by Harvard, Prospect, Austin, and Norfolk streets, was appropriated for a poorhouse. Soon afterward it was proposed to inclose our common,—which with the lapse of time had shrunk to about its present size,—and to convert it from a grazing ground into an ornamental park. The scheme met with vehement opposition, and the town meetings in this growing community suddenly became so large that the old courthouse in Harvard Square would not hold them. Accordingly, a bigger townhouse was built in 1832 on the eastern part of the poorhouse lot, and thus was the civic centre removed from Old Cambridge.
This event served to emphasize the state of things which had been growing up with increasing rapidity since the beginning of the century. Instead of a single village, with a single circle of interests, there were now three villages, with interests diverse and sometimes conflicting as regards the expending of public money, so that feelings of sectional antagonism were developed.
In New England history, the usual remedy for such a state of things has been what might be called "spontaneous fission." The overgrown town would divide into three, and the segments would go on pouting at each other as independent neighbours. We need not be surprised to learn that in 1842 the people of Old Cambridge petitioned to be set off as a separate town; but this attempt was successfully opposed, with the result that in 1846 a city government was adopted. In that year the population had reached 13,000, and was approaching the point at which town meetings become unmanageable from sheer bulk. For small communities, Thomas Jefferson was probably right in holding that the town meeting is the best form of government ever devised by man. It was certainly the form best loved in New England down to 1822, when Boston, with its population of 40,000, reluctantly gave it up, and adopted a representative government instead. The example of Boston was followed in 1836 by Salem and Lowell, and next in 1846 by Roxbury and Cambridge. From that time forth the making of cities went on more rapidly. It was the beginning of a period of urban development, the end of which we cannot as yet even dimly foresee. This unprecedented growth of cities is sometimes spoken of as peculiarly American, but it is indeed not less remarkable in Europe, and it extends over the world so far as the influence of railroad and telegraph extends. The influence of these agencies of communication serves to diffuse over wide areas the effects wrought by machinery at different centres of production. With increased demand for human energy, the earth's power of sustaining human life has vastly increased, and there is a strong tendency to congregate about centres of production and exchange. In 1846 there were but five cities in the United States with a population exceeding 100,000; New York had not yet reached half a million. To-day New York is approaching the two-million mark, three other cities[28] have passed the million, and not less than thirty have passed the hundred-thousand. During this half century the 13,000 of Cambridge have increased to more than 80,000. The Cambridge of to-day contains as many people as the Boston of sixty years ago.