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

[3] Square, was called Braintree Street. A road upon the site of the lower end of Brattle Street with Brattle Square was known as Creek Lane, and it was continued in a southeasterly sweep into Boylston Street by Marsh Lane, afterwards called Eliot Street. On the north side of Braintree Street, opposite Dunster, and thence eastward about as far as opposite the site of Linden, stood a row of six houses, and at their back was the ancient forest. Through this forest ran the trail or path from Charlestown to Watertown, nearly coinciding with the crooked line Kirkland-Mason-Brattle-Elmwood-Mount Auburn; this was the first highway from the seaboard into the inland country. The palisaded wall, with its ditch, for defense against Indians and wolves, started at Windmill Hill, by the present site of Ash Street, and ran along the northern side of the present Common into what is now Jarvis Field, and perhaps beyond.

A writer in 1633 mentions the New Town as ‘too far from the sea, being the greatest inconvenience it hath.’ He describes it as ‘one of the neatest and best compacted towns in New England, having many fair structures, with many handsome contrived streets. The inhabitants, most of them, are very rich, and well stored with cattle of all sorts, having many hundred acres of land paled in with general fence, . . . which secures all their weaker cattle from the wild beasts.’¹

The common grazing-land covered the site of the present Common, and extended beyond the palisade as far as Linnaean Street. It was at the outset directed that houses should be built within the ‘Town’ until it should be properly filled, before going beyond. By 1635, there were sixty-four house-lots within the Town, of which about fifty had homesteads built upon them. The region next occupied by dwellings was the ‘West End,’ extending between Garden Street and the river, as far west as Sparks Street. To provide against the building of cheap and frail structures, it was agreed in 1633 that all houses should be covered with slate or shingles, not with thatch. Before the end of 1635, there were at least eighty-five houses in the New Town.

Eastward from Holyoke (then called Crooked) Street ran Back Lane, while Braintree Street, deflecting southeastward, took the name of Field Lane. These two lanes, meeting near the present junction of Bow and Arrow streets, formed the