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

[183] at No. 6 Appian Way proved too small, and other rooms were rented. All that could be spared by the family were first taken, and then a room was fitted up in a house across the street as a laboratory. Then another room was taken in the house No. 5 Garden Street as a ‘library.’ Later, another room was taken in this house,—a delightful room,—in which the students sat about in easy chairs and listened to learned lectures, or took notes on the great tables with which the room was well supplied. It was in those halcyon days that Mr. John Holmes, who occupied the house numbered 5 Appian Way, had pity on the young aspirants for collegiate honors as they took their admission examinations. and sent over the way certain refreshments which bore a likeness to those which the Council of Radcliffe is in these later days wont to supply from the funds of the treasury. On one occasion a guardian angel in the form of a mortal woman of kindly heart came day by day with refreshments for two of the candidates under her special charge, and was found by the secretary sitting on a hard bench in the Common near by, suffering the hottest rays of the July sun, thinking that her swelterings were naught, if only the girls could make clear their title to a Harvard education! Many a tale could be told of those primitive days. The ‘Harvard education’ was won.

When all the spare rooms on Appian Way had been exhausted, a building became a necessity, and then it was that Miss Fay of her own accord called upon Mrs. Gilman to ask if the Annex would not buy her homestead for its future quarters. The family which had so long occupied the old home had gradually left it, and now it was at the disposition of the ‘experiment.’ The hopes that we had been almost afraid to encourage in the days before we were daring enough to even speak of the plan were ready to be realized. It was with feelings that can be imagined better than they can be written or printed that Mrs. Gilman reported the good news. The offer was brought before the ‘Corporation,’ for in anticipation of the need of real estate the managers had become a corporation, and the Fay House with its surrounding land was purchased. Adjoining land has since been added, and the estate now comprises more than twice as many square feet as it then did.

The first stage in the history that we are following ended at the time that Fay House was purchased, when it had become a