I Travel the Open Road - Classic Writings of Journeys Taken around the World. Various
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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 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.
The causes of this growth of Cambridge might be treated, had we space for it, under three heads. Our city has grown because of its proximity to Boston; it has grown by reason of its flourishing manufactures; and it has grown with the growth of the University. That Cambridge should have shared in the general prosperity of this whole suburban region is but natural. But persons at a distance are apt to show surprise when we speak of it as a manufacturing city. This feature in our development