Lucius R. Paige, History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630-1877, with a genealogical register

[240] building committee inserted this specification: “The house is to be of wood, forty-six feet in front or breadth, and seventy-six feet long, with posts twenty feet and four inches high, and the roof one fourth of its base in height; on each end of the building, in addition to the aforesaid length, will be a portico, of six feet in width, consisting of six fluted Doric columns, with an entablature and pediment.” Internally, there was one principal hall, fifty-nine feet long, of the whole width and height of the building. At the rear, or west end, were two rooms, half the full height, each eighteen feet long and fifteen feet wide, with an entry between them: over which was another room extending across the whole, to which access was had by two flights of stairs from the principal hall. The town held its first meeting in the new house March 5, 1832, and all subsequent town-meetings were held in the same place. After Cambridge became a city in 1846, the Mayor and Aldermen assembled in the southerly small room,¹ and the Common Council in the larger room above, until the evening of Dec. 29, 1853, when, in the midst of a furious snowstorm, the whole building was utterly consumed by fire. Fortunately, all the Records and other books and public papers were preserved, the larger and more valuable portion being removed while the flames were raging, and the remainder being afterwards found in the safe uninjured, except that they were discolored by smoke. After the destruction of this edifice, rooms for the accommodation of the City Government were obtained in the Cambridge Athenaeum, at the easterly corner of Main and Pleasant streets. This edifice was subsequently purchased and converted into the present City Hall.

For the space of forty years after the erection of West Boston Bridge, Cambridgeport was an isolated village, separated from Old Cambridge by a belt of land half a mile in width, almost wholly unoccupied by buildings. East Cambridge was even more completely separated from the other two villages by the Great Marsh. In 1835, the heirs of Chief Justice Dana sold the tract of land now called “Dana Hill,” having laid it out into streets and lots; and they sold other portions of the same estate, in 1840, extending, on the northerly side of Harvard Street, as far westerly as Remington Street. Buildings were soon erected on this territory, so that, within a few years, Old Cambridge and Cambridgeport became one continuous village, and the original