Southern Folk Artist & Antiques Dealer/Collector: Walking around Historic Cambridge, Massachusetts

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Walking around Historic Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Georgian style Longfellow National Historic Site built 1759. Look out for a up and coming post on this lovely home

Happy Thanksgiving!!! I have a wonderful walking tour not of Plymouth, Massachusetts, Where it is commonly believe that the first Thanksgiving happened in 1621. But of Historic Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cambridge of one of those lovely New England towns that one thinks of when thinking about traditional Thanksgiving. Cambridge a lovely city I visited in August of 2009 for five days during my 2 week stay in Boston. The well preserved city is rich in architecture from every area of American history. The city was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England. Cambridge is home to two internationally prominent universities, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Between 1790 and 1840, Cambridge began to grow rapidly, with the construction of two bridges, the first West Boston Bridge in 1792, that connected Cambridge directly to Boston, making it no longer necessary to travel eight miles (13 km) through the Boston Neck, Roxbury, and Brookline to cross the Charles River.

The new bridges and roads made what were formerly large rich estates and marshland into prime industrial and residential districts. In the mid-19th century, Cambridge was the center of a literary revolution when it gave the country a new identity through poetry and literature. Cambridge was home to the famous Fireside Poets—so called because their poems would often be read aloud by families in front of their evening fires. In their day, the Fireside Poets—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—were as popular and influential as rock stars are today.