Profile of a Cantabridgian: Caroline Orne

Recently, my reading has introduced me to Caroline Frances Orne (1818-1905), who was a well-regarded poet in her day, and the first librarian of the Cambridge Public Library. 

The Cambridge Public Library was known as the Dana Library when it first opened in 1858, after its first major benefactor, Edmund Dana. Cambridge residents could pay one dollar a year to be a member of the library, which was initially open one afternoon a week.1 During Orne's sixteen years of leadership, the library became quite popular, and by the time she resigned, it was open every day but Sunday.2

Public libraries were only just starting to become common when Orne took the job. The Boston Public Library had opened five years before.3 At the time, public libraries were expected to provide some guidance about appropriate reading for the general public. In some ways, they were arbiters of taste. Orne was well-regarded for her knowledge of literature and her judgment and taste in selecting books for the library. She was known for taking a personal interest in library patrons and helping them choose books.4

Caroline Frances Orne was friends with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russel Lowell and other women and men of letters.5 While I'm not a scholar of the poetry of the time, I think I hear a bit of Longfellow's influence in her writing, in the lyric, regular but melodic style.

Orne wrote throughout her life. In 1844,  she published a volume of poetry titled "Sweet Auburn and Mount Auburn, with other poems." Mount Auburn cemetery, founded in 1831, is lauded as being the first landscaped cemetery, breaking the tradition of crowded church burial grounds, but Orne was of the generation that had fond memories of that hill when it was just an open natural space, called Sweet Auburn. In the two long poems that begin the volume, Orne celebrates both the past and the present.

As the first landscaped cemetery, Mount Auburn represented a very controlled form of natural beauty. It was, and still is, a place that you visit for pleasure, as well as to visit the dead who rest there. In deliberate contrast, Orne's poem "Sweet Auburn" frequently relates nature and childhood innocence.
It begins,

Far-famed Mount Auburn! in the days of old,
As nature bade thy varied charms unfold,
Ere yet the hand of art had changed thy mien,
And in thy pristine beauty thou wert seen,
A lovelier object wert thou to my view,
Thy name was dearer that my childhood knew.
Sweet Auburn! send the spirit of thy shades
To Iight my song when memory's radiance fades.

The poem also contains some lyric words of Cantabridgian pride.

Lo, where the morning sun shed its first ray,

Boston's bright spires and domes before me lay;

Dorchester's heights, and Charlestown's battle mound,

And many a famous scene lay all around,

Far as the eye might reach, was freedom's hallowed

     ground.

Hamlet and town shone in the distance bright,

And Charles far-winding glowed a beam of light.

…

And, where my eye delighted oft would rove,

Stately old Harvard stood in academic grove.

Caroline Frances Orne may not be a household name in Cambridge today, but her work for the library left a lasting mark on the city, and her poetry (which is in the public domain and available online) is worth a read.

1. Doyle, Edward. A Commemorative History of the Cambridge Public Library. Cambridge: Cambridge Public Library, 1989. Page 3.
2. Doyle 6.
3. Doyle 3.

4. History of the Cambridge Public Library, Alfred Mudge and Sons, Cambridge, 1908. Page 13
5. History (1908), 13

Antidisestablishmentarianism in Cambridge -- Friday

To explain the history of Antidisestablishmentarianism in Cambridge I decided not to untangle the interwoven stories of religious pluralism, the Disestablishment movement and the history of Unitarianism in Cambridge. I think it is in the spirit of the lengthy title of this post. If you're just interested in finally learning what the word means, head to the bottom of the full post (appearing on Friday), but the full story is more complex and richer, which is why it's here.

This is by far the longest post you ever will find at Cambridge Considered. Because of this, I am serializing it, so this week, there will be a new piece every day, but after this week, they will appear on the blog as one post. See Monday's post here, Tuesday's here, Wednesday's here, and Thursday's here.

The End of the Establishment

Those who split off from their Congregational churches and those who were a part of other religions altogether continued to grow in number and in influence. By the 1830's, those in favor of disestablishment were working together to argue that any state establishment of religion inhibited freedom of religion. While many of these groups had once accepted the establishment as long as there was no hierarchy, as stipulated in the state constitution, and as long as their taxes could go to their own church, three decades later they felt the only way to be treated as equals is to end the Standing Order. In time, their view came to dominate public opinion, and antidisestablishmentarianism faded into being the opinion of a minority.¹

In 1833, the General Court of Massachusetts proposed an amendment to the state constitution ending the practice of state-established churches. The people ratified it on November 11th, and it became the eleventh amendment to the state constitution. The amendment replaced the original Article III of the state constitution, which was the article concerning public support of religion, with a statement that every religious society had the right to contract with its members to raise money for support of the minister and the building.² Two hundred years after several dissenting English religious groups came to the are to live under their own religious laws, churches would no longer be established or maintained by the state of Massachusetts.

Disestablishment created a greater wedge between the Unitarians and Trinitarians in the remaining Congregational churches. Since their parishes were no longer defined geographically, many of them found that their theological differences were a reason to divide into separate congregations.³ Some of the churches that had once been state-supported suffered a real financial blow, and had to adjust to being supported by their congregation alone. For the recently-created churches, for Quakers, Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, and others, disestablishment was the beginning of full religious freedom.

Epilogue: The Churches Continue to Evolve

In the mid-nineteenth century, most of the Congregational churches that had stayed on the Trinitarian side of the split underwent a serious of theological changes. By the turn of the century, they had rejected the harshest doctrines on sin and damnation, and embraced positive outlook on human nature. In 1957, the Congregational Christian Churches merged with the Evangelical and Reformed Church to form the United Church of Christ, a mainline Protestant denomination. Today, the UCC is known for being socially progressive; for example, most UCC churches have been supportive of, and active in, civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights movements.⁴

The Shepard Congregational Society, the one that broke off from Cambridge's first church during the Unitarian Controversy, has continued to change over the years. They met in the Old Court House building, which where the Harvard Coop is today, until establishing a more permanent space. Since 1957 they have been known as First Church in Cambridge, Congregational, United Church of Christ, and their current building is just behind the Cambridge Common.⁵

The Unitarian church continued to change over time as well. In the 19^th century, Transcendentalist thought had a profound effect on Unitarian beliefs, although many people originally treated Transcendentalism as radical or heretical. By the turn of the 20^th century, some Unitarian churches were moving away from being explicitly Christian, preferring to value Christ's teachings without the rest of the trappings of the tradition. In 1961, the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America, another liberal group of Protestant origin, merged to form the Unitarian Universalist Association, a humanist religious group whose churches tend to be very liberal – in the modern, political sense of the word. The UCC and the Unitarian Universalist Association, the descendants of the two sides of the Unitarian Controversy, have much in common, and the two organizations even share many parts of their religious education curriculum.

The majority of Unitarians today would be surprised that their religious ancestors supported antidisestablishmentarianism. Like their early American ancestors, many Unitarians use their churches as a unit for organizing for social and political causes, but the great majority (perhaps all?) firmly believe in the separation of church and state in this country. The First Parish in Cambridge had been one of the first members of the Standing Order, and once wanted to keep the religious establishment that privileged their church over others. Today, First Parish Cambridge Unitarian Universalist is the home of a Jewish Culture group, a Women's Sacred Circle / Goddess spirituality group, and a Buddhist practice group, to name a few.⁶

Antidisestablishmentarianism – the word

It's considered by many to be the longest non-scientific word in the English language. According to Etymology Online, the word was coined in 1838 to describe the movement in England.⁷ Now, the term can be applied to a similar movement in any country, and even though it post-dates the controversy in Massachusetts by a few years, historians still use the word to describe what happened here. While Anglicans were on the disestablishment side in America, where they were part of the minority, in England, of course, the Anglican church remains the established church to this day.

For those of you who love words, here's a breakdown to help you remember the word's definition:

Establishment (in this context): The practice of a select set of churches being officially sanctioned by the state, and often supported by taxes.

In Massachusetts, these churches were known as the churches of the Standing Order, and they were the Congregationalist descendants of Puritan churches.

Disestablishment: Ending the practice of a select set of churches being officially sanctioned by the state, and often supported by taxes.

In Massachusetts, this officially took place in 1833, but churches outside of the Standing Order had been campaigning for it for decades.

Disestablishmentarianism: The movement for ending the practice of a select set of churches being officially sanctioned by the state, and often supported by taxes.

In Massachusetts, the participants in this movement included members of religious groups that had arrived through immigration, such as Anglicans and Baptists, and members of religious groups that had split off from establishment churches, such as conservative Congregationalists.

Antidisestablishmentarianism: The belief opposing the movement for ending the practice of a select set of churches being officially sanctioned by the state, and often supported by taxes.

In Massachusetts, supporters of antidisestablishmentarianism mostly came from the established churches, which were the original Congregationalist churches that had maintained their status in the Standing Order during the Unitarian Controversy.

1Cushing, John. “Notes on Disestablishment in Massachusetts, 1780-1833 ” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Apr., 1969), pp. 169-190 . 190.

2http://www.malegislature.gov/Laws/Constitution

3Harris, Mark. Historical Dictionary of Unitarian Universalism. Lanham, Maryland, and Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, 2004. Page 480.

4http://www.ucc.org/about-us/short-course/

5www.firstchurchcambridge.org/about-us/first-church-history

6www.firstparishcambridge.org

7www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=antidisestablishmentarianism

Compete with the Bridge When You Come to It

In the previous post, “The Great Bridge Over the Charles,” we saw the effects of a huge public bridge project, but by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it had become common for the state to grant incorporation to private companies that did much of the development work in the city, including building new bridges. The companies building bridges were often in direct competition with each other, and this competition sparked more building, intense debate, and lawsuits – including one that made it to the Supreme Court.

East Cambridge was sparsely populated before the West Boston Bridge opened in 1793. When the bridge opened, speculators bought lots where they developed housing and storefronts. People, businesses, and industries moved in.¹ A few companies also made the terrain ready for more buildings by diking the marshland and digging a canal.² In the early 1800s, two bridges and four highways to Boston spurred the development of East Cambridge and Cambridgeport.³ (For more information on this growth, see A Very Brief History of Cambridge, 1800-1900 Part I: Cambridge Changes Shape and Size.)

As development continued, a serious rivalry emerged between the proprietors of the West Boston Bridge and those of the Canal Bridge, built in 1809 and popularly called Craigie's bridge.⁴ Each company built several new roads in Cambridge, naturally directing traffic towards their own bridge and creating business opportunities for specific areas of town. Each time, it was resolutely opposed by the other company, and sometimes by the businesses who benefited from the other bridge.⁵

A particularly protracted battle began in December of 1805 and lasted until 1809, and resulted in the creation of Cambridge and Mount Auburn Streets.⁶ Controversially, Andrew Craigie, the main proprietor of the Canal Bridge, was one of the landowners who was paid damages because the new road that he had advocated for cut through his private property.⁷ The town took legal action against Craigie, and in 1813, the court decided that because he would benefit from the road as much or more as he would be hurt by it, he was not eligible for damages. This became legal precedent in Massachusetts.⁸ Despite the conflicts, nearly all the proposed streets were built in the end.⁹

The General Court began discussing the possibility of purchasing both major bridges and making them free as early as 1828.¹⁰ In 1846, the court granted a charter to the proprietors of the Hancock Free Bridge, allowing them to build this bridge between the West Boston and Canal Bridges if they bought both of them. They were authorized to collect tolls until they had earned an amount equal to the outlay plus expenses plus a fund for the future maintenance of the bridges.¹¹ Then, in 1857, the court passed an act authorizing the proprietors to give both bridges to the city once the accumulated fund reached a certain point. The bridges were transferred the following year and became free bridges at that point. The city gave a well-attended public procession to mark the occasion.¹²

The bridges that went directly to Boston did not have an exclusive claim on controversy. The Massachusetts Legislature granted a charter to a company to build the Charles River Bridge to Charlestown in 1785. The bridge was in the same location as the ferry that Harvard had owned since 1650, and replaced the ferry entirely. Ferries had been running from Cambridge since the 1630s, and they had always been government-sanctioned and had the right to collect tolls. The proprietors of the new bridge were entitled to collect tolls for forty years, but during that time they were required to make a fixed annual payment to Harvard, to compensate for the loss of fares collected on the ferry.¹³

Several other bridges were built in Cambridge in the subsequent decades, but in 1828, the Legislature granted a charter to a company to build the Warren Bridge a very short distance away from the Charles River Bridge. This bridge would be made free and public after six years, which meant that it would very soon direct traffic away from the older bridge where tolls were still collected.

The proprietors of the Charles River Bridge sued, claiming that in granting the Warren Bridge charter, the legislature violated Article I, section 10 of the U.S. Constitution, which forbids states from making laws or decisions that impair the obligation of contracts. The case made it to the Supreme Court in 1831, but the court did not reach a decision, and the case was heard again in 1837.

The Proprietors of the Charles River Bridge argued that they had the same rights originally given to the ferry that the bridge had replaced. Since the ferry owner (in this case, Harvard) had the right to be compensated when a bridge made the ferry obsolete, they argued that they also had the right not to be made obsolete by a new bridge. The court decided there was no reason to believe that the privileges conferred on the ferry also applied to the bridge. Chief Justice Taney wrote, “the charter to the bridge is a written instrument which must speak for itself and be interpreted by its own terms.”

The plaintiffs also argued that the state had previously acted as if they had an obligation not to create competition for the Charles River Bridge. In 1792, in the same act that chartered the West Boston Bridge, the Legislature acknowledged that this newer bridge would compete with the Charles River Bridge, and as compensation, the Legislature extended the term that the older bridge could collect tolls by thirty years. However, the Court found that the wording in the act which explained the extension was granted “for the encouragement of enterprise” showed that this was not about obligation, but about incentives for development that ultimately benefited the public.

Ultimately, the Court decided in favor of the Warren Bridge – that is, they decided that granting the charter for the competing bridge was constitutional.

The decision drew on English^† and American precedent that when a corporation is granted the right to do something that benefits the public, any ambiguity in the terms should be interpreted in the best interests of the public. More broadly, it relied on on the precedent that in this type of contract, there is no implied right to protection from competition. Chief Justice Taney explained, 

The continued existence of a Government would be of no great value if, by implications and presumptions, it was disarmed of the powers necessary to accomplish the ends of its creation, and the functions it was designed to perform transferred to the hands of privileged corporations.

A modern reader may wonder why the Charles River plaintiffs thought they had a case at all, but in fact, the case was controversial in its day, and two Supreme Court justices dissented from the majority opinion. This case about Cambridge bridges helped to determine how we think about the idea of competition and contracts today.

Many Cambridge residents are familiar with the story of the Longfellow Bridge, named for the poet because he walked over it regularly while courting his future wife and later wrote a poem about the bridge.¹⁴ Another favorite is the story of MIT fraternity brothers making their mark on the Harvard Bridge by measuring it in lengths of a pledge named Oliver Smoot.¹⁵ But the history of Cambridge's bridges goes deeper than these stories, and encompasses political, economic, and legal change.

†In nineteenth-century America, English law and court decisions from before the American Revolution were often looked to as a legitimate source of insight into legal precedent, since much of our legal system was based on its English origins.

1Paige, Lucius. History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630-1877. (H. O. Houghton and company, 1877), 176.

2Paige 178.

3 City's Life and Times: Cambridge in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Daphne Abeel. (Cambridge: Cambridge Historical Society, 2007) 2.

4Paige 199.

5Paige 203.

6Paige 203-7.

7Paige 207.

8Paige 209.

9Paige 203.

10Paige 201.

11Paige 201.

12Paige 201-2.

13 Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge - 36 U.S. 420 (1837). Justia US Supreme Court Center. http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/36/420/case.html

14http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wadsworth_Longfellow#Courtship_of_Frances_Appleton

15http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot

A Bird in the Belfry Revisited

     Thanksgiving Day marks the one-year anniversary of Cambridge Considered!

     Readers who have been with Cambridge Considered since the beginning, or who have explored the modest archives, will know that in my first post, I attempted to verify the rumor that a group of Harvard students hung a turkey in a bell-tower as a Thanksgiving prank sometime in the nineteenth century.  I first found mention of the event in an 1896 essay, and it was also mentioned, with some differing details, in a twentieth-century source. Since the later source claims the event happened in 1873 and that was the year that the Harvard Magenta (now called the Crimson) began publication, I had hoped to find mention of the prank in the student paper. However, the paper did not report on anything to do with turkeys between 1873 and 1896.

     I continued researching, and while I still have not found a primary source, I did find an earlier description of the event. In his short book “An Historical Sketch of Harvard University, from its foundation to May, 1890,” American author and Harvard graduate William Roscoe Thayer described a turkey prank that he said took place “in the middle decades of the [nineteenth] century.”[1]

     Thayer described Harvard student life in the University’s early years as being filled with pranks, bonfires, and small explosions.[2] He described a culture where student protests, over serious or trivial concerns, were not uncommon, and larger “rebellions” took place every few decades. The larger events often resulted in expulsions, but in the mid-nineteenth century, the school began punishing smaller offenses in the hope of maintaining order.[3]

     Thayer included the turkey prank in a list of examples of the freedoms students allowed themselves in defiance of the college rules. “Once a huge turkey was found hanging on the College bell when the janitor came to ring for morning prayers; once a pair of monstrous boots dangled from the Chapel spire, and once there was a life-and-death struggle in the Chapel between the watchman and a desperate student.” He noted that such events “called for severe measures from the Faculty.” Any one of these incidents would probably be a good story if Thayer had elaborated, but instead he went on to say that impressive pranks, particularly large and destructive ones, had declined and practically come to an end by about 1870.[4] This may have been the result of college president Charles William Eliot’s strategic loosening of discipline; for example, he told proctors to ignore the bonfires students set in the yard, and such acts of mischief became less common.[5]

      A different type of student rule-breaking also put turkeys Harvard’s lore. In the school’’s early years, students were required to take their meals in the dining hall, but the food did not always live up to students’ standards. In 1672, the records of the college court noted that students had stolen turkeys from a Cambridge resident’s yard, and eaten them at the home of a Mr. Gibson.[6] Apparently, Samuel Gibson and possibly a few of his friends made a business out of serving hearty dinners made out of whatever fowl students captured -- and that often meant stolen geese and turkeys.[7]  A decade later, illicit turkey dinners were mentioned in the court records again; these dinners took place in students’ dorm rooms.  The tradition appears to have continued for years. An 1886 biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. quotes a man named H.K. Oliver in a section on the student culture that Holmes was a part of. Oliver remembered “the raiding-for, the roasting (tied to a string, and twirled before an open fire)... and the festal surfeit over the  Meleagris Gallopavo -- Gobbler!”  All the supplies and condiments “were ensconced in a trap-door-covered box beneath the floor” in Hollis Hall.[8] Based on surrounding anecdotes, the author seems to place the event in the late 1820s or early 1830s.

      If no students ever did hang a turkey from the College bell, then perhaps the dinners of stolen birds, with supplies hidden in college buildings, were the origin of the rumor. Live turkeys, whether wild or raised for food, were certainly a more common sight in Cambridge in the years when the city was not yet industrialized. In my opinion, it is just as plausible that students would capture and kill a turkey to hang it up in an unlikely place as it is that they stole birds for lavish dinners.  The three sources I have found describing the event were each written years after the time they claim it happened, and only one of them said that it took place at Thanksgiving. Still, keeping in mind that it may be apocryphal, a turkey swinging from the college bell is a Thanksgiving tale worth telling this year as well as last.

1. Thayer, William Roscoe. An Historical Sketch of Harvard University, from its foundation to May, 1890. (Cambridge, MA: 1890) Reprinted from The History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts. D. Hamilton Hurd, Ed. (Philadelphia: J.W. Lewis & Co., 1890). 52

2. Thayer, 51

3. Thayer, 52

4. Thayer, 53 

5. Townsend, Kim. Manhood a Harvard: William James and Others. NY: W.W. Norton and Co., 1996. page 126.  

6. Cited in Batchelder, Samuel. Bits of Harvard History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924. page 102. 

7. Batchelder 208. 

8. Kennedy, William Sloane. Oliver Wendell Holmes: poet, littérateur, scientist. Boston: S.E. Cassino and Co., 1883. 87-88. 

A Very Brief History of Cambridge, 1800-1900, Part III: Progress and Progressivism

     Cambridge's story in the later part of the nineteenth century follows the same pattern as that of many American cities. Rapid development in industry caused rapid growth in population and in the gap between rich and poor. The 1870's and 1880's saw a new culture of wealthy elite, but also an increase in philanthropy. Cambridge shared America's concerns about corruption in business and government that were the hallmark of the Gilded Age. By the late 1880's through the turn of the century, The Progressive Era had taken root in Cambridge, marked by many types of reform movements that tried to address the problems of an industrial society. The changes in these decades included more technological advancements, changes to higher learning, movements for greater social equality, and programs to improve the public welfare.

   

    In the previous A Very Brief History of Cambridge article, we saw how much of Cambridge became a modern industrial city. Meanwhile, Harvard was growing and changing in its own ways. Throughout the nineteenth century, the school made a number of additions that aided both research and their classes, and incidentally brought new ideas and experiences to the public as well – at least the sector of the public with leisure time. An example is the Botanic Garden, founded in 1801.¹ The Harvard Observatory was founded in 1839; four years later, the sky blazed with a comet that became known as the Great Comet of 1843. The event was frightening to many people who didn't understand that comets are natural and not supernatural, but to the scientific-minded, it was a sign that Cambridge needed to invest in a high-quality telescope. A group raised money to buy and install a fifteen-inch refracting telescope, which was at the time the second largest in the world.²

      Professor Louis Agassiz founded the school's Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1859, to house a collection of objects that he felt was important to make available both for scientific advancement and for teaching purposes.³ The museum began as a personal project of his, and for some time, many people called it the Agassiz Museum⁴ (Since 1998, however, it has been a part of the Harvard Museum of Natural History).⁵ Then, in 1866, philanthropist George Peabody founded Harvard's Peabody Museum, one of the first-ever museums of anthropology.⁶ The educated and wealthy elite of Old Cambridge were able to collect from all over the world for their own pleasure, but this was also the era when people began to show real interest in cultural artifacts as things to be valued.

     Technological changes continued to modernize the city. In 1889, both Boston and Cambridge began work on electric street trolleys, making them the second and third cities in the country to do so.⁷ Additionally, some city-wide advancements in technology and engineering were performed specifically for the public good, like building sea walls on the dirty banks of the Charles.

      While technology, industry, and the spread of information all had noteworthy developments in the nineteenth century, social movements also made significant progress during this time. A few of the landmarks were that Cambridge public schools went co-ed in 1846, and they became racially integrated in 1855 in accordance with a new state law. In the 1880s Maria Baldwin, an African American who had graduated from a local teaching program, surprised the school committee by applied for a teaching position at a Cambridge school. At first, many were hesitant to give her the position, but she was qualified, and she became first female teacher in Cambridge.⁸

      Higher education was another matter. For many years, tensions grew between a faction of people who firmly believed that women should be admitted to Harvard alongside men, and another faction who found the idea of mixed-sex education abhorrent. In 1878, Radcliffe college was born as a compromise. At Radcliffe, women would be educated by Harvard professors with the school's blessing, but they would not be Harvard students and they would receive a “certificate” that was not a Harvard degree.⁹ By that point, there were already a number of coeducational colleges and a handful of women's colleges, but they were strongly in the minority.

     Progressive movements were, naturally, steeped in the culture of their times. Nineteenth-century advocates of women's rights in government believed that women would be a calming, humanizing force on an increasingly cold and brutal world. While the underlying premise of this belief is based on rigid gender roles, in some cases, the idea was right.

      In 1841, Dorothea Dix, a school teacher, visited the East Cambridge Prison to begin teaching women's Sunday school classes there, and found that the conditions were abjectly inhumane. The prisoners were neglected in damp, unheated cells, and sometimes they were beaten or left without clothes. She began what was to become a nationwide campaign to create separate institutions to care for the mentally ill. Before Dix's reform efforts, many mental illness patients who were not self-sufficient and whose families could not care for them had been put into prisons.¹⁰ This was one of the many reform movements that took place in that era, as people took stock of the new structure of society now that much of the nation lived in cities and much of the economy was industrialized.

      Another example of a national reform movement having direct implications in Cambridge was the temperance movement. Anti-alcohol activists cited the effect of drunkenness on families on communities, pointing to many incidents of saloon violence and a few local murders, but also the phenomenon of saloons wielding a big and corrupt influence on local government.¹¹ When Massachusetts gave cities the option to stop providing liquor licenses in 1881, Cambridge debated the subject for five years, but in December of 1886, the temperance advocates won, and they continued to win in yearly votes on the subject until 1933, at the end of Prohibition. If nothing else, the “no-license law” did dramatically decrease the number of arrests from drunkenness – because people drank in Boston and the Boston police arrested the rowdy ones on their way home.¹²

    In the 1870's, some cities in the United State and England began experimenting with the idea of a systematic organization or association of charities. Cambridge's Associated Charities was formed in 1881 and incorporated in 1883, with the aim of ending poverty by addressing its causes. It had offices throughout the city, trying to identify the needs of the population and inform related charities.¹³ One such charity was the Cambridge Young Women's Christian Association. The book Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors, which includes several essays I have cited in Cambridge Considered, was published in 1895 by the group as a fund-raiser and an awareness-raiser while they attempted to secure a building of their own. The YWCA provided shelter for women, and taught girls and women of all backgrounds domestic and workplace skills.¹⁴

      From the 1870's through the 1890's, Cambridge saw a blossoming of public-minded organizations. The groups founded during those years included two hospitals, two medical clinics, a home for orphans, the Home for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, several kindergartens, several homes for senior citizens, and numerous religious and civic organizations.¹⁵ Perhaps the most interesting of these groups is the Cambridgeport Union Flower Mission, which provided flowers to the homes of people who could not afford luxuries.¹⁶

    The Progressive Era continued in the first few decades of the twentieth century, and Cambridge was to change in many more ways as the years went on.

1Leavitt, Henrietta. “The Agassiz Museum.” Merrill, Estelle, ed. Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors. Cambridge Young Women’s Christian Association. (Boston: The Pinkham Press, 1896), 143.

2Leavitt, Henrietta. “The Harvard Observatory.” Merrill, Estelle, ed. Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors. Cambridge Young Women’s Christian Association. (Boston: The Pinkham Press, 1896), 133.

3Leavitt, Henrietta. “The Botanic Garden.” Merrill, Estelle, ed. Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors. Cambridge Young Women’s Christian Association. (Boston: The Pinkham Press, 1896), 126.

4Leavitt 126.

5Harvard Museum of Natural History website. <http://www.hmnh.harvard.edu/about_the_museum.html> Accessed 6-21-2011.

6 Peabody Museum website. Accessed 6-21-2011.

7 Sutton, S.B. Cambridge Reconsidered: 3 1/2 Centuries on the Charles. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1976),62.

8 Sutton 79.

9 Gilman, Arthur. “A Chapter of Radcliffe College” Merrill, Estelle, ed. Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors. Cambridge Young Women’s Christian Association. (Boston: The Pinkham Press, 1896), 183-4.

10Sutton 53.

11 Foxcroft, Frank. “Cambridge as a No-License City” Merrill, Estelle, ed. Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors. Cambridge Young Women’s Christian Association. (Boston: The Pinkham Press, 1896), 229.

12Sutton, S.B. Cambridge Reconsidered: 3 1/2 Centuries on the Charles. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1976), 82.

13 Houghton, Elizabeth. “The Charities of Cambridge” Merrill, Estelle, ed. Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors. Cambridge Young Women’s Christian Association. (Boston: The Pinkham Press, 1896), 238.

14Merrill, Estelle, ed. Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors. Cambridge Young Women’s Christian Association. (Boston: The Pinkham Press, 1896), xii.

15 Houghton, 240-3.

16 Houghton,  243.

Time and Tide in Cambridge

     Picture Cambridge in 1637, or 1700, or 1776. What do you imagine? Perhaps churches, small houses, or the common. Now imagine looking to the east. What you should see in your mind's eye is a stretch of salty, tidal marshland, and then open water for over a mile before you see the town of Boston in the distance. The Charles River as it flows through Cambridge today did not begin to take shape until the early nineteenth century, and it did not take the form it has today until the twentieth. Both Cambridge and Boston underwent land fill projects in the nineteenth century, also called land reclamation, in which solid land is made from wetland or water. Boston's project was massive, doubling the size of the city, but Cambridge's land fill was also very significant, as changed our relationship to the Charles forever.

     The watery gap between Boston and Cambridge was two miles at its widest point before any human interventions, which is three times the current distance.¹ Near the present-day site of MIT, there were once oyster beds so large that they posed navigational challenges for boats passing through the basin.² Just like the harbor it flowed into, the water had a tide; the difference in water level between high and low tide averaged nine feet.³ At high tide, East Cambridge became an island. Surrounding the river itself were salty marshes. Tidal marshes are divided into a higher zone and a lower zone, and it is typical for the low zone to be underwater at high tide and exposed at low tide. The tidal marshes in Cambridge included mudflats, which are created naturally by the buildup of sediment deposited in an estuary or other body of water. Such marshes are typically covered in grasses and rushes that have evolved to fit this unique niche, and they are also the home of a number of animal species, especially shellfish and migratory birds, that are adapted to their conditions.⁴

    Human alterations to the Charles River and its environs started slowly and snowballed through the nineteenth century. Early Cambridge settlers sometimes harvested the slender grasses growing in the marshes to dry and feed to livestock as “salt hay.” Harvesting salt hay didn't have much of an effect on the land or the ecosystem.⁵ In the 1790's, as part of an entrepreneurial boom of speculation and development, developers drained marshes and filled them with gravel, dug canals, and built wharves in the area that was becoming Cambridgeport.⁶ Unfortunately, increased construction created problems on the Charles River. In order to constructors bridges over the wide spans of water between Cambridge, Boston, and Charlestown, builders had to create causeways, altering the water flow. Now, local sewage was collecting in the narrowed river basin, and when the intertidal zone was exposed at low tide, the mud flats had a potent stench. In the following decades, human waste was joined by industrial waste.⁷ People began to recognize the altered marshes as a sanitary hazard as early as the 1820's, regarding clean, fresh air as a matter of the general welfare of the public.⁸ Construction and land fill on the Boston side throughout the nineteenth century changed the water flow considerably, making the problems even worse.

      In Cambridge, appetites for land were also growing. A group of property owners, seeking to develop the area for luxury residences, of the Charles formed the Charles River Embankment Company in 1881. and set out to develop the area in several ways. They constructed the Harvard Bridge in 1891. Afterwards, they attempted to build a sea wall on the Cambridge shore, using a suction dredge. The river bottom on the Cambridge shore was too hard for the dredge, but another company used the dredge on the Boston side. It caused a huge stench and a controversy over that stench by pumping up sewage, but the project was completed. ⁹ The luxury residences never materialized. Once the land was finished, new railroads in the area made it much more inviting to new factories.¹⁰

      The made land certainly boosted both cities' economy, but the loss of the marshes had long-term consequences. Wetlands aid in water filtration, including filtering sewage and industrial waste.¹¹ At low tide, when the mud flats were exposed, the smell was awful. It got worse and stronger as the river became polluted by industry.¹² The tidal current of the river itself had grown swift and dangerous since all the water from what was once a bay was now channeled into a smaller space.¹³ In 1873, the state Board of Health reported that Massachusetts had “no territory of equal extent... in so foul and so dangerous a condition” as Miller's River, which was a part of the Charles River area. In the same report, the Board speculated that if an epidemic disease was ever introduced in the area, the river would cause the disease to spread horribly. In 1878, the Board reported that “large areas have been at once, and frequently, enveloped in an atmosphere of stench so strong as to arouse the sleeping.”¹⁴

    To solve these problems, Cambridge and other municipalities took title to the shores of the river in the 1880's and 1890's. They built seawalls and scraped the river bottom with dredges, pumping the mud being dredged up into the areas where land was being created.¹⁵ Also in the 1890s, marshes west of the Charles were drained to become Soldiers Field.¹⁶ By the early twentieth century, the Massachusetts Legislature had gotten involved, forming the Committee on Charles River Dam and later on the Charles River Basin Commission. This bodies undertook the final steps to make that open stretch of water into the river we know today.¹⁷ They created a temporary dam by 1908, using locks and sluices to let water in and out. The permanent dam, by Lechmere point, was finished in 1910, and stood until it was replaced by the current Charles River Dam in 1972. The 1910 dam meant that the Charles would no longer have tides, marshes, or mud flats. ¹⁸ The land that had once been mud flats was soon built on for use by MIT, which moved from Boston in 1916.

    Creating land to build on and to eliminate the sanitary problems also meant destroying the marshes. This may not have seemed like a loss at the time, but we now understand just how vital marshes are. As mentioned above, salt marshes are a unique habitat, and the plants and animals that make their homes there are unlikely to thrive anywhere else. One example of an ecological disruption is the American Shad, a large herring which used to spawn in the Charles. Shad disappeared from this area early in the 20^th century, probably because of pollution and the construction of the 1908 dam. They were reintroduced in the 1980's.¹⁹

     One of the biggest environmental and human consequences of making land on the Charles was not revealed until the 1950's, when a few significant hurricanes struck New England. Instead of the absorbent marshland, the river was surrounded by asphalt.²⁰ The city embarked on a difficult and expensive project to replace the 1910 dam. The new dam included sophisticated pumps to prevent future floods, and they were very successful. In 1984, the region faced serious floods, but Cambridge got off lightly: the city had to deal with flooding from the rain, but not from an overflowing river.²¹ More importantly, the concept of “natural valley storage” began to emerge around the 1970's. This is the idea that we should preserve wetlands because they store water and help to prevent floods, an idea that is now well-established in environmental science.²² In a 1994 study, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers found that wetlands along the Charles that had been saved prevented flooding that could have caused $17 million in damage.²⁴ Now that Cambridge has learned first-hand the good and the bad that comes of altering a wetland area, we can carefully consider the potential effects of any future project. Today, Massachusetts has strict regulations on how wetlands, including the kind surrounding the Charles River, can be altered.

Earth Day 2011 was this past Friday, April 22. Happy belated Earth Day!

1Haglund, Karl. Inventing the Charles River. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), xvi.

2Hall, Max. The Charles: the People's River. (Boston: David R. Godine, 1986), 24.

3Haglund 7.

4http://water.epa.gov/type/wetlands/marsh.cfm#tidal [Accessed 4-22-11]

5Haglund 8.

6 Seaburg, Alan. Cambridge on the Charles. (Cambridge: Anne Miniver Press, 2001), 23.

7Haglund 1.

8Haglund 35.

9Whitehill, Walter Muir. Boston: a Topographical History (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1959), 182.

10Hall 38.

11“Fact Sheet on Functions and Values of Wetlands.” Environmental Projection Agency. September 2001.

12Hall 36.

13Hall 36.

14 Massachusetts Board of Health reports, 1873 and 1878. Quoted in Haglund, 110.

15Hall 38.

16Hall 64.

17Hall 47.

18Whitehill 188.

19Hall 86.

20Hall 68.

21Hall 72.

22Hall 74.

23“Fact Sheet on Functions and Values of Wetlands.” Environmental Projection Agency. September 2001.

24http://www.malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXIX/Chapter131/Section40