CHAPTER XVI.

CAMBRIDGE, AND HARVARD COLLEGE, IN 1817.

Having obtained a professor, the next thing necessary for the new School was a location; and this was provided by a vote of the Corporation, September 5, 1817, as follows:

Voted, that the President may appropriate the lower north room of Mr. Farrar's House to be a Lecture Room and Library for the Professor of Law if it shall appear to be wanted for those purposes.

:

The "Farrar House," referred to, was a low, two-story, wooden building, situated on the northwest side of what is now Harvard Square, next to the present Lyceum Hall. In this building, two rooms were devoted to the School, one for recitation, the other for a professor's room and library.

Before describing the details of administration of the early years of the School, it may be of interest to give a rough picture of the town of Cambridge and of the College, in 1817.

On the first Wednesday of October, in the year 1817, the Harvard Law School first opened its doors. One lone student registered his name, although five more entered during the year.

The Cambridge, however, to which that solitary student-the predecessor of the 719 law students of to-day-turned his steps, and among whose traditions and conditions the early law students acquired a knowledge of their profession, was a far different place from the city of to-day. It was then a peaceful country town-cut off from Boston by its situation-independent, quiet, and studious.

Perhaps the quaintest contemporary account of it is that given by Timothy Dwight, President of Yale College, in his Travels in New England, written in the year 1812(1):

The settlement of Cambridge was begun under the immediate direction of the government, in the year 1631. The town was laid out in squares; one of which was left open for a market,

(1) Travels in New England, by Timothy Dwight (1821).

and is now known by the name of Marketplace. (1) Four of the streets run from North to South, and three from East to West. The houses exhibit every gradation of building, found in this country, except the log-hut. Several handsome villas, and other handsome houses are seen here, a considerable number of decent ones, and a number, not small, of such as are ordinary and ill-repaired. To my eye this last appeared as if inhabited by Men accustomed to rely on the University for their subsistance; men, whose wives are the chief support of their families by boarding, washing, mending, and other offices of the like nature. The husband, in the mean time, is a kind of gentleman at large; exercising an authoritative control over everything within the purlieus of the house; reading newspapers, and political pamphlets; deciding on the characters, and measures, of an Administration; and dictating the policy of his country. In almost all families of this class, the mother and her daughters lead a life of meritorious diligence, and economy: While the husband is merely a bond of union, and a legal protector of the household. Accordingly, he is paid and supported, not for his services, but for his presence. In every other respect he is merely nugae canorae; just such another talking trifle as a parrot; having about as much understanding, and living just about as useful a life; a being, creeping along the limits of animated and unanimated existence; and serving, like an oyster, as a middle link between plants and animals. If such men are not found here, Harvard College may boast of exclusive privileges. This thought struck me irresistibly, as I was walking in the streets. How far it is applicable in fact, I am not informed.

The public buildings in this town, are two churches, a Presbyterian, and an Episcopal; the latter small, and in very bad repair; a grammar school-house; a court-house; a goal; and an almshouse.

A more poetic description is given by Lowell, in his memories of Cambridge of Thirty Years Ago, written in 1854:

Approaching it [the town] from the west by what was the new road (2) you would pause on the brow of Symonds' Hill to enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid. In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts, which had seen Massachusetts a colony and were fortunately unable to emigrate with the Tories by whom or by whose fathers they were planted. Over it rose the noisy belfrey of the College, the square brown tower of the church, and the slim yellow spire of the parish meeting-house, by no means ungraceful and the one invariable characteristic of New England religious archi

(1) Now (1908) Winthrop Square.

(2) Now Concord Avenue.

tecture. On your right the Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt-meadows, darkened here and there with the blossoming black-grass as with a stranded cloud shadow. Over these marshes, level as water but without its glare, the eye was carried to a horizon of softly rounded hills. To your left hand upon the old road you saw some half-dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting southward. If it were early June the rows of horse-chestnuts along the fronts of these houses showed through every crevice of their heap of foliage and on the end of every drooping limb a cone of pearly flowers Such was the charmingly rural picture which he, who thirty years ago went eastward over Symonds' Hill, had given him for nothing, to hang in the Gallery of Memory. We called it "the Village" then, and it was essentially an English village, quiet, unspeculative, without enterprise, sufficing to itself. A few houses, chiefly old, stood round the bare Common with ample elbow-room.

Up to the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, the two main avenues of the town had been the old highways-the King's Highway, leading from Charlestown to Watertown, and the Turnpike Road to Menotomy, leading from the Great Bridge (built in 1662) along what is now Boylston Street, passing the College buildings, crossing the King's Highway and continuing up Massachusetts Avenue (formerly North Avenue).

In November, 1793, the West Boston Bridge had been built at a cost of $76,000. It was described by the Independent Chronicle as "for length, elegance, and grandeur not exceeded by any in the United States, if in any part of the world." (1) The Cambridge and Concord Turnpike was continued a few years later to meet the causeway at the end of the bridge. In 1809, the Canal Bridge (now known as the Craigie or East Cambridge

(1) The Columbian Centinel of November 27, 1793, in describing the opening of the bridge said: "The elegance of the workmanship and the magnitude of the undertaking, are perhaps unequaled in the history of enterprises. We hope the proprietors will not suffer pecuniary loss from their public spirit."

Judge Iredell of the U. S. Supreme Court, while holding Circuit Court in the Eastern Circuit, wrote to his wife, May 27th, 1795: "The improvements in almost every part of America are wonderful. The bridge between Boston and Cambridge far exceeded my expectations. The causeway leading to Cambridge which is railed in like the bridge is a mile and a quarter long; and the bridge itself three-quarters of a mile, the whole as straight as an arrow; the carriage-way very wide, with passages on each side for foot-passengers, beautifully painted and with an astonishing number of fine lamps all along on each side. The river is very deep and very rapid, notwithstanding which the whole of this bridge was completed, so as to be passable at least, in about six months."

Bridge) was opened; and at the same time Cambridge Street was built, leading from Lechmere Point (East Cambridge) to the Colleges. At this time there was only one dwelling-house on Lechmere Point.

The topography of Cambridge around the College Yard was that of a pleasant country village. Near the present corner of Mt. Auburn Street and DeWolfe Street stood, as now, the handsome, square, colonial mansion of Squire William Winthrop, the son of Prof. John Winthrop.

Opposite the College Yard on Braintree Street (later Main Street, now Massachusetts Avenue) was the large estate, and the house (now standing) known as the "Bishop's Palace," built in 1760 by the first Episcopal Rector of Christ Church in Cambridge, Rev. Mr. Apthorp. Farther along to the west on Braintree Street, the other old pre-Revolutionary estates, with their gardens, had only recently been cut up into smaller lots. On the east corner of Braintree Street and Crooked Street, now Holyoke Street (where the Porcellian Club stands), was the store of John Owen, the publisher-the University Bookstore. On the opposite corner of Crooked Street was a dwelling-house. The present site of Sever's Bookstore had been, in the 17th Century, the old village pond, but in 1817 it had long been filled in. Next, on the corner of Dunster Street, stood a house owned by the College, and used as a dormitory (1817-1823), known as College House No. 3. Behind, on Dunster Street, was the old garden of Judge Danforth, and a lot on which stood a printing office, both owned by the College. On the opposite corner of Dunster Street (the home, in 1638, of Stephen Day, the first printer in America) stood Willard's Hotel, where the public booked for places in the hourly stage for Boston, fare twentyfive cents or for Cambridgeport, fare eighteen and three-quarters cents. "At nine and two o'clock Morse, the stage-driver, drew up in the College Yard and performed upon a tin horn to notify us of his arrival. Those who went to Boston in the evening were generally forced to walk. It was possible, to be sure, to hire a chaise of Jeremy Reed, yet his horses were expensive animals, and he was very particular in satisfying himself of the undoubted credit of those to whom he let them," writes Josiah Quincy, of the Class of 1821, in his Figures of the Past, and Dr. A. P. Peabody, of the Class of 1826, speaks of "that dreary walk

to Cambridge in dense darkness, with no lights on our way, except dim oil lamps at the toll-houses, over a road believed to be infested with footpads, but on which we neither met nor passed a human being between the bridge and the College Yard. Indeed . . the road was then so lonely that we used to make up parties of four or five to attend meetings or lectures in Boston." (1)

On the corner of Boylston Street, in 1817, stood Deacon Levi Farwell's country store. Across Harvard Square, on its west side, stood the old Middlesex County Court House (on the present site of the Lyceum Building), a square, wooden building with a cupola, built in 1758, and removed, in 1841, to the corner of Brattle and Palmer Streets (where it now stands). Abandoned for court purposes, when the court moved to East Cambridge, in 1816, it continued to be used for town meetings until 1831; and as Lowell wrote:

The old Court House stood then [1824] upon the Square. It has shrunk back out of sight now; and students box and fence where Parsons once laid down the law, and Ames and Dexter showed their skill in the fence of argument. Times have changed, and manners, since Chief Justice Dana (father of Richard the First and grandfather of Richard the Second) caused to be arrested, for contempt of court, a butcher who had come in without a coat to witness the administration of his country's laws, and who thus had his curiosity exemplarily gratified. Times have changed since the cellar beneath it was tenanted by the twin brothers Snow. Oystermen were they indeed, silent in their subterranean burrow, and taking the ebbs and flows of custom with bivalvian serenity. Careless of the months with an R. in them, the maxim of Snow (for we knew them but as a unit) was "When 'ysters are good, they are good; and when they ain't, they isn't."

For 120 feet north of the Court House, there was a garden, and then an old, two-story, wooden dwelling, with a gambrel roof, much after the style of the present Wadsworth House. It had formerly been occupied by Samuel Webber, President of Harvard College, 1796-1806, at the time when he was Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. Known at various times as the Williams House, the Russell House, the Farrar

(1) It is to be recalled that the first gaslight company in the countrythe Boston Gas Light Company-was not incorporated until 1826, and that by 1834 the city of Boston had only 34 gaslights in its streets.