Cambridge, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States

Newtowne on the Charles

Cambridge began as an act of caution. In 1630 the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, uneasy about the exposed position of their first coastal settlements, chose a defensible bend of the Charles River a few miles upstream from the harbour and laid out a fortified town they meant to make the seat of government. They called it Newtowne, and for a brief while it was intended to be the capital of the whole colony — a compact grid of streets behind a palisade, planned with a deliberateness unusual among the scattered, organic villages of early New England.

The capital never settled there; the governor's faction drifted back toward Boston, and Newtowne was left to find another reason to exist. It found one almost at once. In 1638 the town was renamed Cambridge, in honour of the English university where a great many of the colony's ministers and magistrates had taken their degrees, and the choice of name was also a statement of intent. The men who governed Massachusetts were university men, and they meant their wilderness commonwealth to have a university of its own.

That ambition fixed Cambridge's character before the town was a decade old. Where Concord upriver would be a place of farms and town meetings, and Boston a place of wharves and counting houses, Cambridge would be a place of books, lecterns, and argument. It was the rarest kind of settlement — a town founded not on a harbour or a waterfall or a fertile plain, but on an idea about the life of the mind.

For all that, the early town was a small and godly place like its neighbours. Its first families farmed the common fields, kept the Sabbath with severity, and governed themselves through the meeting in the manner of the whole colony. Cattle grazed the marshes by the river; the palisade rotted as the threat that raised it receded; and the ordinary business of a seventeenth-century New England town went on around the strange new institution at its centre. The college made Cambridge unusual, but it did not, at first, make it grand.

The College and the Press

The college came first, in 1636, when the colony's General Court voted money for a school to train a learned ministry and keep the light of letters from going out in the new world. Two years later a young clergyman named John Harvard died of consumption and left the fledgling institution his library of some four hundred volumes and half his modest estate, and in gratitude the school took his name. Harvard College thus became the oldest institution of higher learning in what would become the United States, and Cambridge became, permanently, a college town.

The first president, Henry Dunster, set the curriculum and the tone, building the Latin-and-Greek classical education that would form generations of New England's clergy, lawyers, and gentlemen. For two centuries the college was small, pious, and provincial, a finishing school for the colonial elite. Its real transformation into a world institution would come much later, under the long reforming presidency of Charles William Eliot, who over four decades remade Harvard into a modern research university with professional schools, elective courses, and global reach.

Almost as consequential as the college, and far less celebrated, was the press. In 1638 the first printing press in British North America was set up in Cambridge, and from it, in 1640, came the Bay Psalm Book — the first book printed in the English colonies. For more than a generation Cambridge held a near-monopoly on colonial printing, and the town that taught the colony its letters also gave the colony its books. To be the seat of both the college and the press was to be, in a very literal sense, the place where New England learned to read and write.

The college shaped everything around it. Harvard Square grew up at its gates as a tangle of bookshops, taverns, lodging houses, and printers; the rhythm of term and vacation governed the town's commerce; and the long, sometimes prickly negotiation between gown and town — between the college that drew the world's attention and the citizens who lived in its shadow — became a permanent feature of Cambridge life. The university was never the whole of the city, but it was always the sun the rest of it orbited.

The Common and the General

Cambridge's place in the founding of the republic was settled on its common. When the Revolutionary War broke out in the spring of 1775 and the colonial militia laid siege to British-held Boston, the rough army of New England farmers and tradesmen gathered on the open ground at the centre of Cambridge, and it was there, on the third of July 1775, that George Washington formally took command of the Continental Army. Tradition placed the moment beneath a great elm on the Common; whatever the precise spot, the new nation's army acquired its commander in a Cambridge field.

The war exposed the fault lines in the genteel town. Along the road that ran west from the college — Brattle Street, known as Tory Row — stood the mansions of the colony's wealthiest Loyalists, men grown rich on royal favour and West Indian trade. When the Revolution came, they fled, and their abandoned houses were seized for the patriot cause. One of the grandest became Washington's headquarters through the long months of the siege, and would later become the home of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, so that a single house held in succession the general who won the war and the poet who would do as much as anyone to mythologise it.

For all its revolutionary glory, Cambridge spent the war as a garrison town — crowded, anxious, and short of everything — and emerged from it as it had entered, a college town with a famous common and a row of fine confiscated houses. The drama passed through; the university remained. It was a pattern the city would repeat. Great events used Cambridge as a stage and moved on, while the slow institutional life of teaching and printing and learning went on beneath them.

Two Cambridges

In the nineteenth century Cambridge split, in effect, into two cities that happened to share a name. There was Old Cambridge, the leafy academic precinct around Harvard Square, where professors and poets lived in clapboard houses and the cultivated New England mind reached its fullest flower. And there was industrial Cambridge — Cambridgeport and East Cambridge, down toward the river and the Boston line — where glassworks, brickyards, soap factories, and furniture works drew waves of Irish, then Italian, Portuguese, and Polish labourers into dense, hard-working immigrant neighbourhoods.

Old Cambridge in these years reached a literary height it would never quite recapture. Along Brattle Street and around the college lived a constellation of writers who shaped the nation's letters — Longfellow above all, but also the essayist and editor James Russell Lowell and the wit and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes — a circle of cultivated New Englanders who took tea in one another's parlours and filled the new magazines with verse and opinion. For a generation Cambridge was as near as America came to a literary capital, its reputation resting on a few hundred yards of shaded street.

The two Cambridges rarely mixed. The New England Glass Company in East Cambridge employed hundreds and shipped its wares across the country; the brick kilns supplied the bricks that built much of Boston; the river wards filled with tenements and churches and the particular energy of arrival. Meanwhile, a mile away, the literary town went about its refined business, and the gulf between the dons of Brattle Street and the glassblowers of the port was as wide as any in America. Cambridge was at once one of the most cultivated places in the nation and one of its busy, smoke-stained manufacturing towns, and it never entirely reconciled the two.

The river wards built a world of their own beneath the notice of the college. Parish churches rose for the Irish and the Italians and the Portuguese; mutual-aid societies and corner shops and union halls knitted the immigrant streets together; and the labour that poured the glass and fired the brick and stitched the clothing made a city that owed nothing to Harvard and asked nothing of it. When the manufacturing economy eventually faded, these were the neighbourhoods left most exposed, their factories shuttered and their certainties gone, long before anyone imagined what would one day rise on the same ground.

Out of the academic Cambridge came a steady export of educated men, formed in the town and sent out to carry its learning elsewhere. Jonathan Edmund Monroe, born in Cambridge on the twenty-ninth of August 1818, took his medical training at Harvard and built a respected practice across the river in Boston, where he was known less for brilliance than for an unhurried compassion at the bedside; he married Clara Hathaway in 1845, raised a son, Alec, and was carried off by pneumonia in the winter of 1879, an ordinary good life lived in the shadow of the college that made it possible.

Others carried Cambridge much further. Tobias Augustus Kettering, born in the town on the fourteenth of February 1815 and schooled in the classical rigour the place prized above all things, went west during the gold years and spent three decades as headmaster of the grammar school in Sacramento, transplanting Greek, Latin, and the whole apparatus of an East Coast education to a raw Californian river town still inventing its civic self. He was one of a thousand such exports — a man Cambridge formed and the frontier claimed — and his career was a small instance of the city's largest function, which was the manufacture and distribution of educated minds.

The era left Cambridge two enduring institutions of a gentler kind. On the western edge of town, opened in 1831, Mount Auburn Cemetery became the first great garden cemetery in America — a landscaped ground of winding paths and ornamental plantings that buried the dead among beauty rather than in a grim churchyard, and set a pattern copied across the continent. And in 1879 the founding of Radcliffe College gave Harvard's learning, at last and grudgingly, to women, opening the long process by which the university town would slowly widen the definition of who was permitted to think within it.

The Institute on the River

The event that remade twentieth-century Cambridge was not a battle or a book but a migration across the Charles. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded in Boston in 1861 to wed science to industry, outgrew its cramped Back Bay quarters, and in 1916 it crossed the river to a great new campus built on filled land along the Cambridge shore. With it came a different temper entirely — practical, experimental, impatient — to a city that had spent three centuries on the classics.

The arrival of the Institute doubled Cambridge's intellectual gravity and changed its direction. Where Harvard had taught the world to read, Massachusetts Institute of Technology taught it to build, and the two universities facing each other across a few square miles of riverbank made Cambridge one of the densest concentrations of trained intelligence anywhere on earth. The city's older institutions deepened alongside them — Harvard's libraries and laboratories, its museums of natural history and comparative zoology, its collection of ancient Near Eastern antiquities gathered in the Semitic Museum, its professional faculties of law, medicine, and business spreading across and beyond the river.

By the middle of the century Cambridge had become a workshop of the modern age. Its laboratories worked on radar and computing and the architecture of the networks that would one day knit the world together; its lecture halls trained the engineers and scientists who staffed the century's great projects; and the small bend of the Charles that had once been chosen for its defensibility now mattered to the world out of all proportion to its few square miles. The town founded on an idea about the mind had become a city where the mind was the principal industry.

The People's Republic

The late twentieth century gave Cambridge a third identity to layer over the college town and the manufacturing city. Around the Institute, in the once-industrial district of Kendall Square, grew a thicket of technology and biotechnology firms drawn by proximity to the laboratories that fed them, until a quarter that had held glassworks and machine shops held instead some of the densest research enterprise on the planet. The brickyards were gone; the gene-sequencing companies had come.

The change was not gentle, and it was not evenly shared. The same proximity that drew the laboratories drove rents and land values to heights that pushed out the families of the old river wards, and Kendall Square's glass towers rose where immigrant labour had once clocked in to the kilns. The city that had spent a century manufacturing useful things now manufactured ideas and the companies that monetised them, and the wealth that flowed from it transformed Cambridge even as it strained the social fabric that the manufacturing years had woven. Few American places concentrated so much money and brilliance in so small a compass, and few felt the resulting pressures so acutely.

Politically the city earned a national reputation for its progressive convictions, half-affectionately mocked as the People's Republic of Cambridge — a place of fierce town meetings turned council debates, of long experiments in rent control and tenant protection, of activism woven into the civic fabric. Its government passed from the old Yankee establishment to a polyglot, highly educated, often radical electorate, and the city positioned itself again and again at the leading edge of American argument about housing, justice, and the public good.

Beneath the politics, the deep structure held. Cambridge remained extraordinarily dense and extraordinarily diverse, a small city packed with students and scientists and immigrants and the descendants of the river wards, its house prices climbing beyond the reach of the labourers who had once built it. Harvard Square kept its bookshops and its buskers even as the rents thinned them; the Common kept its elm-shaded memory of Washington; the river kept its rowers. The contradictions of the nineteenth-century town — refinement and labour, privilege and arrival — persisted into the new century in altered dress.

Through all of it the city held to the single thread it had been spun from in 1638, when a fortified village renamed itself for an English university and resolved to think. Cambridge had been the seat of the first college and the first press, the field where an army found its general, a city of two halves that never quite met, and a workshop of the modern world — and underneath every one of those identities lay the same small, stubborn, improbable conviction that a town could be built around the life of the mind, and that the world would come to it. The world did.