This text is part of:
“
[235]
suitable enclosures, and shall forever remain unused for a public street, unoccupied by any building, and open as a public park.
In due time the work was accomplished; a suitable fence was erected, the ground properly graded, walks constructed, and trees planted, so that the park has already become ornamental to the city.”
1
Cambridge Common originally extended northwestwardly as far as to Linnaean Street, including all the land thus far between Garden Street and North Avenue. It was used for military parades and other public purposes, but especially for the safe keeping of the herd of cows, through the nights of the summer season, and was therefore called the Cow-common.
In April, 1720, a survey was made for the purpose of division; but the work was not completed until 1724, when that portion lying northerly of Waterhouse Street was laid out into lots, which were assigned to individuals.
The Common was thus reduced substantially to its present dimensions.
It continued to be the property of the “Proprietors of Common lands,” until Nov. 20, 1769, when they “Voted, that all the common lands belonging to the Proprietors, fronting the college, commonly called the Town Commons, not heretofore granted or allotted to any particular person or persons, or for any special or particular use, be and the same is hereby granted to the town of Cambridge, to be used as a training-field, to lie undivided, and to remain for that use forever; provided nevertheless, that if the said town should dispose of, grant, or appropriate the same, or any part thereof, at any time hereafter, to or for any other use than that aforementioned, that then and in such case the whole of the premises hereby granted to said town shall revert to the Proprietors granting the same, and the present grant shall thereupon be deemed null and void, to all ”
1 Across the westerly end of this burial place a large lot was reserved for the burial of paupers and strangers, generally called the “Strangers' lot.” In the Cambridge Chronicle, Aug. 20, 1846, the late Mr. Daniel Stone, who had long been Superintendent of the ground, published some reminiscences, among which was the following: “Remarkable Coincidence. In February, 1826, Lemuel Johns, an Indian aged fifty-nine years, from the tribe that once owned Grafton, . . . was buried in the Strangers' Lot, as his turn came in rotation. From two to three feet from the top of the ground, the diggers came upon an ancient Indian fireplace, and had to remove nearly a ton of stones from the spot. That part of the town being, according to appearance, formerly a great place for Indian resort, we expected to come across other relics of the Red men; but before and since that time, there have been more than 2500 burials in all parts of the lot, and this is the only discovery we have made. This was the only Indian buried in the ground, and it would seem that he had been providentially brought into the improvements of perhaps some of his ancestors.”
Boston. Houghton and Mifflin. 1877.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.