This post was authored by our Simmons 438 Archives intern, Elise Riley.
At the turn of the 19th century Cambridge’s built environment entered into a period of flux. New buildings and streets were added as the city developed. Neighborhoods expanded as houses were built into the burgeoning urban landscape. Beginning in 1910, the neighborhood of Shady Hill saw the addition of several streets including Irving Street, Bryant Street, and Francis Avenue.
Top Left: “E” – Bryant St. from corner of Irving St., May 3, 1912. Top Right: View from Irving Street. Bottom Left: View from same point as above, September 1920. Bottom Right: View from same point as above, September 2, 1916.
The Charles N. Cogswell Collection (P014) consists of a scrapbook and loose photographs that depict these changes to the built environment in Cambridge, as well as daily life, in the late 19th century. Charles N. Cogswell, a Cambridge resident and Boston architect, lived at 61 Kirkland Street from 1882 until his death in 1941, aged 76.
Charles’s brother George Cogswell on a penny-farthing.
Cogswell attended Harvard University and went on to study architecture at M.I.T. and at the Ecole de Beaux Arts, Paris. While the bulk of his professional work took place in Boston, Cogswell dedicated his free time to capturing the changing architectural landscape of his Cambridge neighborhood.
Top right: April 30, 1910. The beginning of the extension of Francis Avenue through to Museum Street, before the Andover Seminary Building was constructed. Bottom left: 61 Kirkland Street. Bottom right: [Francis Ave.] View from same point on September 2, 1916 [Professor Chas H. Haskins-House in distance]Shady Hill is located east of Harvard Yard, right next to what is now the Harvard Divinity School. The Cogswell Collection is unique because it captures the in-between moments of growth in Cambridge and shows what the city looked like as construction was happening.
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Cogswell’s neighborhood was also home to several notable Cambridge residents. While Cogswell lived on Kirkland Street, around the block on Irving Street lived Harvard professors William James and Josiah Royce.
Views from Irving Street, 1891.Aerial view of Irving Street, 1888.
E.E. Cummings and Julia Child would later live on this same block of Irving Street, the Childs in Royce’s former home at 103 Irving Street (above).
In his scrapbook, Cogswell also included snapshots of daily life and events in and around Cambridge.
Cyanotype photographs of a regatta on the Charles River, 1887 or 1888.Family dog, Kinch, on the Cambridge Common.Top: View of Holmes Field, 1886 or 1887. Bottom: Shaw Barn on Kirkland Road after the fire, April 7, 1886 (owned by Prof. G.M. Lane).
The finding aid will soon be available on our website. To view photographs from the collection, check out our Flickr page, or email histcomm@cambridgema.gov to make an in-person research appointment. The Cambridge Historical Commission also holds files on 61 Kirkland Street and the other addresses mentioned in this scrapbook.
Today’s blog post comes to you from our guest author, CHC volunteer Michael Kenney.
“Was there a city of Norumbega” on the Charles River just upstream from Cambridge? That was the rhetorical question posed in 1891 by Eben Norton Horsford, a chemistry professor at Harvard and developer of Rumford Baking Powder. And he was certain of the affirmative answer.
Horsford’s brook-no-doubt answer is to be found in his Defenses of Norumbega, now in the library of the Cambridge Historical Commission. It is an answer he proves to his satisfaction with a series of 16th century maps and the journals of an 18th century seaman, with the name itself derived from the Algonquin word for “a quiet place between the rapids.”
As for the “habit of ear” which was a key element of his researches, Horsford notes in an aside that he had spent his childhood among Indians as the son of missionaries.
It is a densely-argued thesis, with excursions into the accounts of voyages from those of Leif Ericsson to Samuel de Champlain, along with the narratives of explorers and merchants who visited the “city of Norumbega.”
Should one wonder what remains, Horsford offers, by way of an answer, speculative maps including the one reproduced here (above), as well as the curious photograph (below) of what he describes as “the dam, docks and wharves of the ancient city of Norumbega,” sitting alongside the Charles River at Weston.
And the still-curious will find, tucked into the farthest southwest corner of Cambridge, a collection of Horsford-themed streets — Thingvalla Avenue (named for a kettle-hole which Horsford thought was a Norse amphitheater), Ericsson Street, Norman Street, Norumbega Street, and Vineyard Street.
Stay tuned for a future blog post on the interesting Mr. Horsford and Rumford Baking Powder.
We are pleased to announce that our online catalog is nearly complete and is now live to the public. Cataloging the CHC Research Library has been a long process, but entirely worth it. We are especially grateful for the hard work of our cataloging intern, Becky Shea, whose efforts made it possible to complete the catalog.
The CHC is proud to present a new GIS Story Map created by our own Sarah Burks, Preservation Planner, available here! This fun Story Map focuses on the long-gone lunch carts and dining cars in Cambridge.
“From the earliest horse-drawn lunch carts to the streamlined stainless steel cars, diners were once plentiful in Cambridge. But where did they all go? Some diners moved into brick and mortar locations and others relocated to other towns. The recent Food Truck trend appears to be a revival of the portable dining car, but they don’t offer the seating and table service of yesterday.”
Take a tour of Cambridge diner photos and share your diner memories with us at histcomm@cambridgema.gov. Have you been to any of these diners?
Recently, the CHC formed a partnership with the Cambridge Public Library (CPL) in an effort to make our collections more digitally accessible. With the help of CPL Archivist Alyssa Pacy, we have begun to encode finding aids from our repository and upload them into an ArchivesSpace account that the CPL is kindly sharing with us.
Some of our readers may be wondering why this project is beneficial, or you may be unsure about what encoding a finding aid means. Let’s start at the beginning:
After a collection is donated to us, we perform a number of steps to ready the materials for research and use. Among these are physical processing as well as arrangement and description. The final product of this process is an organized collection with an accompanying finding aid, a document that describes the records and their significance.
At the CHC, we create print and PDF copies of our finding aids to be used in our office and to make available on our website.
PDF finding aid for the Xonnabel Clark Collection
Whereas these versions are text-searchable, encoding a finding aid renders the text machine-readable and gives meaning to each section described. This is achieved by encoding the finding aid in XML (Extensible Markup Language). This process is akin to writing HTML to create a website.
A snippet of the XML document encoded for the Xonnabel Clark Collection using Oxygen XML Editor software.
After our finding aids are encoded, we upload the XML document to a platform that can convert this information to display nicely for human eyes while still retaining the machine-readable “meaning” behind the words. In our case, we are using ArchivesSpace.
The Xonnabel Clark Collection finding aid – available on ArchivesSpace
One example of this capability is in the subjects section. In paper or PDF finding aids, these items are simply words that convey the multiple subjects that may exist within a collection. Employed digitally, these subjects link collections with the same subject by just clicking your mouse.
So, we hope you are as excited about our ArchivesSpace partnership with CPL as we are! We hope to continue to encode both new and existing finding aids to make all of our resources from the CHC more accessible. In the meantime, follow the links below to view our ArchivesSpace page or browse one of our available finding aids: the Cambridge Manual Training School/ Rindge Manual Training School/ Rindge Technical School Collection. We would love to hear your feedback!
The CHC recently opened a small but significant group of materials: the Dr. Charles E. Vaughan Collection.
Charles Everett Vaughan was born into the prominent Vaughan family of Hallowell, Maine on August 24, 1835. By the time he was 15, Charles and his family had relocated to Cambridge. His father, also named Charles, worked as a brush dealer for J. J. Adams & Co. in Boston. Below are two of the company’s advertisements from 1922.
The Vaughans were descended from British merchant and Jamaican plantation owner Samuel Vaughan and his wife, Sarah Hallowell. Charles E.’s grandfather Charles was one of the first settlers of this historic Maine town. His great-uncle Benjamin Vaughan, a well-known political radical in England before settling in Hallowell, was a close friend of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.[1]
Image of a historic bridge at Vaughan Woods & Historic Homestead in Hallowell, Maine. The homestead is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and is now a part of the Kennebec Land Trust. Photograph by Norm Rodrigue.
After graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1863, Dr. Charles E. Vaughan served as an assistant surgeon during the Civil War. He later married Elizabeth F. Wells of Cambridge in 1866.
Marriage announcement of Dr. Charles E. Vaughan and Elizabeth F. Wells in Quincy, Mass. Cambridge Chronicle, 28 April 1866.
That same year, the couple moved to a house on Garden Street between Mason Street and Appian Way across from Cambridge Common. Dr. Vaughan also used the home, now known as 8 Garden Street, as the base for his medical practice.
View of the Cambridge Common from the northeast, 1875. Appian and Mason have been highlighted, as well as property between them.
Elizabeth passed away in 1883. Dr. Vaughan lived at 8 Garden until 1886 he moved to 4 Brewster Place in 1886. After the death of his first wife, Vaughan married Alice C. Carter of Cambridge on October 11, 1894. Dr. Vaughan kept his practice on Garden Street until his retirement in 1895.
Plan of land at 8 and 10 Garden Street, pre-1853
In 1895, Dr. Vaughan retired to Santa Barbara, California, and the following year he sold his property on Garden Street to Radcliffe. Dr. Vaughan died on June 24, 1904 and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery.
The Dr. Charles E. Vaughan Collection contains correspondence, deeds, maps, leases, and other documents related to the 8 Garden property and its sale by Dr. Vaughan to Radcliffe College in 1896. Documents relate to previous owners of the property including Charles C. Foster of Cambridge and Louisa Higginson of Brattleboro, Vermont.
Pages of Agreement to convey land – Louisa Higginson to C. C. Foster, 1852Plans regarding the sale of the Garden Street property to Radcliffe College, 1896
To view these and other items from this collection, please stop by the CHC during our research hours: Monday: 2:00-7:00pm, Tuesday: 2:00-4:00pm, or Wednesday-Thursday: 10:00am-12:00pm and 2:00-4:00pm. To make a research appointment with our archivist Emily, please call 617.349.4683 or e-mail egonzalez@cambridgema.gov.
This post was authored by our Simmons 438 Archives intern, Jacky Martin.
You may have heard of the Clarks before. Emory J. Clark Square sits at Fern Street and Concord Avenue. Emory’s Pharmacy was the first Black-owned and operated pharmacy in Cambridge.
But this collection is about Xonnabel.
Xonnabel Clark was a teacher and counselor for various area schools over the years. She received a Masters of Education from Harvard University. She raised five children. She was a very active member of her church, Grace Vision United Methodist. And I think – because I’ve not met her – that she is curious and passionate about learning and likes piecing puzzles together.
It’s the last two sentences that are important for this collection.
Clark became the unofficial historian for her church back in the 2000s, when the congregation needed to find the official deed for the church building. She traveled to the Cambridge Registry of Deeds and successfully located the document. That adventure sparked an interest in records and the history of her church that led to her working with the CHC to make the church into a historical landmark, and writing a report called The History of Grace Vision United Methodist 1871-2009: 138 Years of Christian Service (yes, we have a copy and yes, I’ve read it).
After spending two weeks with this collection, I understand her interest.
A colored postcard of the church
The Grace Vision United Methodist Church was built in 1887. Its original congregation was an outgrowth of a Sunday School-type program called the Sabbath School, which was run by Baptist, Congregational, and Methodist churches including the Harvard Street Church. The original congregation was called the Cottage Street Methodist Episcopal Church, due to its location on Cottage Street, before it moved to the Magazine Street building and renamed itself Grace Methodist Episcopal Church. Since then it’s gone through four name changes (from Grace M.E. to Grace Methodist to Grace United to finally Grace Vision United). That’s five different names for one enduring congregation.
And by all accounts, the congregation’s focus on community and outreach that started with the Sabbath School didn’t change. The church sponsored Scout Troops, ran arts programs, and remained an active part of the community. From the original Sabbath School to Grace Academy, the Grace Vision UMC strove to always contribute to the local community.
One of the many Boy Scout Troops the church sponsored
The collection itself is an interesting mix of official documents and informal photographs.
An old church newsletter; note the baseball statistics
The largest part of the collection (aside from the History) are the church programs that Clark kept over the years. From Martin Luther King Day celebrations to joint Easter Sunday services with other churches to Anniversary services and banquets, these programs run the gamut of the various events that are a constant part of a church’s life.
One of the multiple programs for Martin Luther King, Jr. celebrations
More interesting – to me at least – are the newsletters and correspondence in the collection. Much of the collection consists of formal minutes from the multiple inter-church organizations that Grace United Methodist was a part of, but the rest includes church newsletters and messages to the congregation. My favorite is the “Cakeless Cake Sale” letter, which is written almost entirely in rhyme.
A Cakeless Cake Sale, a novel new way to do bake sales
The collection is a unique snapshot of the life of a church, taken by someone who clearly cares greatly for this church and its history.
A photograph of Sunday service
View the finding aid for this collection here. If you would like to learn more about this collection, please call us at 617.349.4683 or e-mail our archivist, Emily, at egonzalez@cambridgema.gov to make a research appointment.
If you are in the Boston-Cambridge Metro area, consider attending this “Transcribe-a-thon” on February 14 at Northeastern University, in celebration of Frederick Douglass’s 200th birthday. Archives staff members at the CHC will be participating online, which you can do, too. Click here for more information on participating online.
Details on the Northeastern event below:
Please join us this Valentine’s Day for a transcribe-a-thon in celebration of Frederick Douglass! In partnership with the library’s Open Access programming, the NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks and the Women Writers Project, Northeastern University’s Digital Scholarship Group will be hosting a local event at Northeastern’s Snell Library, as part of a much larger celebration organized by the Colored Conventions Project, the Smithsonian Transcription Center and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Although Douglass was born into bondage, and never knew his birthdate, he chose to celebrate every year on February 14. We will commemorate his birthday by creating Black history together, transcribing at our library while streaming online with the national event. Pizza and snacks will be served!
Participants should bring their own laptops, if possible, but no previous experience is required. This event is free and open to the public. RSVP here: https://northeastern.libcal.com/event/3916854.
Happy New Year! We here at the CHC hope everyone had a lovely and restful holiday season. To kick off the new year, we’d like to share a fun event series hosted by our friends over at the Cambridge Public Library (original post at the Cambridge Room’s blog):
Are you looking for something fun to do in the new year? Join the Cambridge Public Library for our popular 4-week beginner’s genealogy workshop series. Classes will be held at CCTV, located at 438 Massachusetts Avenue.
Join us for a 4-week, beginner’s genealogy workshop. For two hours each week, we will demystify the overwhelming process of sorting through online records as well as give tips for how best to make use of research visits to local repositories. We will help you find ancestors, organize your research, and start a family tree. Come with a new question every week and leave with an answer and something tangible to bring home, such as a copy of a birth certificate. By taking this class, you will be automatically eligible to enroll in a FREE, two-part course on digital storytelling taught by CCTV. Learn how to make a digital film about your family’s history based on your genealogical research. Create a treasured digital keepsake to pass on to family members. Registration is mandatory for the series. To register, please contact Keaton Fox at keaton@cctvcambridge.org.
Yesterday marked the last official day of American Archives Month (October), and we wanted to thank everyone who participated in some of our own celebratory archives events here at the CHC.
In case you missed it (ICYMI):
On October 4, the CHC archivist – with the help of the City of Cambridge’s Director of Communications – took over the City of Cambridge Twitter account for Ask An Archivist Day. Anyone with questions about any and all aspects of archives – not just in Cambridge – could tweet to @CambMA and use the hashtag #AskAnArchivist to get a response. Check out some of the great questions and other interesting Cambridge history tidbits here!
We featured a couple of “behind the scenes” looks at some interesting collections in our archives via our Instagram.
Our new research series, “Researching the History of Your House in Cambridge”, took place from October 16 to today, November 1. This was a collaborative three-week event highlighting house history resources at the Cambridge Room (Cambridge Public Library), the Historical Commission, and the Department of Public Works.
Research series attendees browsing and learning at the CHC
If you missed this year’s research series, stay tuned, as we’ll be offering it again in a couple of months. And don’t forget, you can always make an appointment with us to research your building or house: histcomm@cambridgema.gov or 617-349-4683.
