The Cambridge of eighteen hundred and ninety-six: a picture of the city and its industries fifty years after its incorporation
Arthur Gilman, Ed.

[37] to have seen the students climbing or swinging on Dr. Charles Follen's outdoor gymnastic apparatus; or perhaps forming to trot away with him at double-quick, their hands clenched at their sides, across the country. The rest of the Delta was covered with apple-trees, whose fruit we boys used to discharge at one another from pointed sticks. Looking down Professors' Row we could see but four houses, the open road then proceeding to Somerville. On Quincy Street there was no house between Professors' Row and Broadway, and we used to play in what was said to be an old Indian cornfield, where the New Church Theological School now stands. Between Quincy Street and Cambridgeport lay an unbroken stretch of woods and open fields, and the streets were called ‘roads,’—the Craigie Road and the Clark Road, now Harvard Street and Broadway, each with one house on what was already called Dana Hill. Going north from my father's house, there were near it the Holmes House and one or two smaller houses; up ‘the Concord Road,’ now Massachusetts Avenue, there were but few; the Common was unfenced until 1830; up Brattle Street there were only the old houses of Tory Row and one or two late additions. On the south side of Brattle Street there was not a house from Hawthorn Street to Elmwood Avenue; all was meadow-land and orchards. Mount Auburn Street was merely ‘the back road to Mount Auburn,’ with a delightful bathing place at Simond's Hill, behind what is now the hospital,—an eminence afterwards carted away by the city and now utterly vanished. Just behind it was a delicious nook, still indicated by one or two lingering trees, which we named ‘The Bower of Bliss,’ at a time when the older boys, Lowell and Story, had begun to read and declaim to us from Spenser's ‘Faerie Queene.’ The old willows now included in the Casino grounds were an equally favorite play-place; we stopped there on our return from bathing, or botanizing, or butterflying, and lay beneath the trees.

North Cambridge as yet was not, though Porter's Tavern was; and we Old Cambridge boys watched with a pleased interest, not quite undemoralizing, the triumphant march of the ‘Harvard Washington Corps’—the college military company—to that hostelry for dinner on public days; and their less regular and decorous return. The outlying settlement of East Cambridge, oftener called Lechmere's Point, was more rarely visited;