East Cambridge in the Revolution
Introduction: East Cambridge Before the Revolution
The area we now know as East Cambridge was for many centuries largely salt marshes and mud flats that, at low tide, virtually cut the area off from other parts of the city, as well as from Boston. The rich oyster beds contained there served as an important resource to the Indigenous inhabitants of the area, the Massachusett people, as well as the early European colonists who settled nearby, but its geographical features meant the area was not a suitable choice for permanent settlement.
The English engineer Thomas Graves was the first European colonist to settle in East Cambridge, surveying it for potential use by the new arrivals. The area came to be known as Graves’ Neck and was set off from the rest of Cambridge by Gibbon’s Creek to the north, Oyster Bank Bay to the east and the Great Marsh to the south.
For more than a century following Graves’ sale of his land grant, most of the land at Graves’ Neck remained in the control of several families who farmed and consolidated parcels and passed them to their descendants. In the mid-18th century, Richard Lechmere (who had married the daughter of Lt. Gov. Spencer Phips) purchased a large tract of land on Graves’ Neck and subsequently bought out most of the other property owners. Not wanting to be isolated from the elite of Cambridge, the Lechmeres made their primary residence on Brattle Street and rented out their Graves’ Neck farm, then known as Lechmere Point; when they fled to England during the Revolutionary War, their property was confiscated by the Committee of Correspondence.
Stop 1: British Landing Marker
Second Street Entrance to Centani Park
On the night of April 18-19, 1775, when the Charles River covered a larger area of East Cambridge, British officers chose to sail from Boston to East Cambridge because it was the shortest and least conspicuous route to what would come to be known as the Battle of Lexington and Concord. They marched from Boston Common, sailed from near Arlington Street and landed at Lechmere’s Point, named for the Tory Cambridge property owner Richard Lechmere. Lechmere Point’s location made it the best choice for the British soldiers to land, but its marshy landscape made for a difficult slog on their way westward.
With residents looking on, the soldiers marched from sparsely settled East Cambridge to the present Gore Street, Somerville Avenue, Elm Street, Beech Street and Massachusetts Avenue in North Cambridge and finally on to Lexington, where they encountered armed militia that included men from Cambridge. East Cambridge widow Elizabeth Rand saw the soldiers near her house and told her neighbor, Samuel Tufts, who then mounted his horse to spread the alarm.
Stop 2: Site of Fort Putnam
Following the Battle of Lexington and Concord, thousands of soldiers from all over New England marched to Cambridge to join the Revolutionary Cause. Among these men was General Israel Putnam and his Connecticut-based militia. Serving under Gen. Artemas Ward, Putnam was instrumental in planning and executing the June 17 Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the earliest battles of the Revolution. The British won the battle, taking control of Charlestown, but lost more than 1,000 men twice the casualties suffered by the Americans.
Soon after, on July 2, 1775, General George Washington arrived in Cambridge to take charge of the troops that had assembled on the Cambridge Common and were under the command of Putnam and Ward. The Americans, fearing attacks on Cambridge after the Bunker Hill engagement, had begun to build defensive fortifications on all of the hills of Cambridge and Somerville. Like the other Continental Forces in Cambridge, Putnam and his company aided in the large-scale earthworks project that sought to fortify the town against future British attacks. The works at Lechmere’s Point, including Fort Putnam, were completed in February 1776 and consisted of earthworks as thick as 17 feet to protect the trenches from the British bombardment. Putnam’s men placed four large cannons at the site, retrieved from Fort Ticonderoga in New York by Henry Knox.
The Continental Army began to bombard British positions in Boston on March 2 with cannon and mortar fire from Lechmere’s Point and other positions around the city. This continued for several nights, and was soon joined by fire from Dorchester Heights, which overlooked the harbor and the British naval fleet more directly. But their efforts were short-lived – on March 10, British commander William Howe began preparations for his forces to evacuate the city and, on March 17, 1776 (still known in Boston as Evacuation Day), 120 ships and 11,000 people sailed out of the harbor headed for Nova Scotia.
The rest of the Revolutionary War took place outside of Cambridge and, in fact, outside of New England, and Fort Putnam and its surrounding earthworks were largely forgotten. Houses, churches, and a school were later built on the site, which is now owned by the Cambridge Housing Authority and serves as senior housing. This stone marker on the side of the current building is all that remains to mark the site of this important Revolutionary site.
Stop 3: Site of Revolutionary Causeway
Corner of Third Street and Rt. 28
In April of 1929, the Cambridge Chronicle reported that a steam shovel clearing the foundation for a new meat-packing plant in East Cambridge had uncovered timbers that turned out to be the causeway over which the British troops had marched on the way to Lexington and Concord on April 18-19, 1775. An editorial in the Cambridge Chronicle following the discovery noted that the city schools had decided that all Cambridge high school students should take a field trip to inspect the site, calling it “a worthwhile innovation” that would “help to show the changes which have taken place since Miller’s river covered a large part of East Cambridge.” The discovery of the causeway, which the editorial noted would soon be covered up again by the new foundation being laid, proved especially significant at this point in the city’s – and the neighborhood’s – history, and symbolizes the melding of past, present, and future.
In 1926, just a few years before the causeway’s discovery, Cambridge had joined the rest of the country in celebrating the nation’s 150th anniversary of independence. In 1929, School Committee member Charles Hurley spoke in support of Cambridge students viewing the causeway, arguing that “there has not been an era since just before the Civil War, when a return to first principles is more needed than now,” and that “[e]very move that aims to revive the spirit of Concord and Lexington is good seed that, with a little cherishing, will bear good fruit.” Visiting the causeway and remembering the Revolution – and Cambridge’s role in it – would help to remind Cantabrigians of the guiding principles of the Republic, which Hurley and others felt was sorely lacking in the Cambridge of 1929.
Such a discovery would have been newsworthy in any part of the city, but its location in East Cambridge was especially significant given the area’s role in industrial production. East Cambridge had long been a center of industry for the city, and the causeway served as an early example of engineering ingenuity that foreshadowed the developments to come. Long sidelined as the place where important-but-unsightly functions such as meat-packing, coal production, and other necessary industries were housed, along with their accompanying odors, smog, and pollution, East Cambridge had an opportunity in 1929 to reclaim its history and place itself at the center of the city’s story.
By January of 1930, the causeway was once again hidden, buried deep beneath the new foundation for the John Merrell and Co. meat-packing plant. But for several months in 1929, the people of East Cambridge revelled in the chance to showcase both their neighborhood’s role in the founding of the nation and its place in the present and future state of Cambridge’s economic, political, and social development.
Stop 4: East Cambridge History Station
208 Cambridge Street, outside the Registry of Deeds
In preparation for the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976, the City of Cambridge tasked the Historical Commission to create “history stations” in various parts of the city to highlight their roles in the city’s past. This is a great opportunity to think about not only the historical information that is presented in a historic marker, but also about the circumstances at the time these markers were created and installed – what was the atmosphere in Cambridge (and the country as a whole) like in the mid-1970s, and how might this have influenced how the City approached the Bicentennial? We encourage you to visit the East Cambridge History Station, particularly the section on the Revolution, and then share your thoughts about what is included here. As the City begins the process of reevaluating and revising some of its public markers, is there anything you are curious about and would like to see included?
Stop 5: Site of Phips Farm/Lechmere Point
Entrance to Lechmere Canal, off of First Street
The land around us here is now commonly known as Lechmere Point, but before it acquired that name, it was known for being the site of Phips Farm, after Spencer Phips. The adopted son of Sir William Phips, the first governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, Spencer Phips entered politics in his own right in 1721 when elected to the provincial assembly. His family connections had set Phips up for political and economic prominence and, several years after his graduation from Harvard in 1703, he bought a large tract that encompassed much of what is now East Cambridge and settled there with his family.
Phips was appointed to the governor’s council in 1721, and from 1732-1757 was the lieutenant governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. During two periods (1749-53 and 1756-57) Phips served as acting governor while William Shirley was abroad.
As a prominent landowner and politician, Phips had set his children up to marry well; in the 1730s Phips’ daughter Rebecca married the up-and-coming merchant and land speculator Joseph Lee and settled into 159 Brattle St., known commonly as the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House. While we do not have direct evidence that this house was occupied by enslaved people on a permanent basis, we know that Joseph Lee and Rebecca Phips enslaved two men, Caesar and Mark Lee/Lewis, on other Massachusetts properties that they owned, and it is likely that one or both stayed with the Lees when they were at their Brattle Street property. Spencer Phips, too, was an enslaver, holding five people in bondage, so his children would have grown up expecting to be waited on by enslaved servants. His daughter, Mary Phips, married judge Richard Lechmere, who also owned a large tract of land in East Cambridge, and the melding of the two families led to a consolidation of most of the land in the area. By the time of their marriage in 1754, however, the center of the political, economic, and social elite was in the area around Harvard Square and, although the Lees and Lechmeres, and Phips owned large estates in East Cambridge, they preferred to live among their peers on Brattle Street, including Phips’s other daughters, who had married into the Boardman and Vassall families.
In addition to his land in Cambridge, Phips was part-owner of a large tract on what is now the central coast of Maine (then part of the Province of Massachusetts Bay). In 1719, the owners began to develop the land for white settlement to the objection of the local Abenaki People, who argued that their leaders had made land grants to the colonists without authorization from the tribe. Conflicts increased in the 1720s and, for the next several decades, tensions flared between the Abenaki and the colonists, leading Shirley to declare war on the Abenaki in 1754.
In its declaration of war, Massachusetts made an exception for one group of Abenaki: the Penobscot People, whom the colonial government claimed were exempt from their attacks. In reality, the position of the Penobscot made them vulnerable to the same brutality at the hands of colonists as other Abenaki. In the ongoing colonial battles between the English and the French, Indigenous peoples were pressured to take sides; although the Penobscot desired to remain neutral, their geographic location meant that they could not escape colonial politics. Seen as pro-British by the French and pro-French by the Maine colonists, the Penobscot found themselves pushed increasingly toward French alliance because of incidents such as a 1755 attack by New England militiamen on a Penobscot fishing party.
In 1755, while Shirley was away from the colony, Phips issued a declaration of war against the Penobscot, offering cash rewards for each scalp of a Penobscot person turned into the colonial government. Phips’ proclamation put a value of 50 pounds for males over age 12, while women and male children under 12 were deemed to be worth 25 pounds and female children were worth 20 pounds. The next year, the colonial assembly voted to allow scalp bounties of up to 300 pounds – by far the largest sum ever offered in a wartime declaration. In 1759, Massachusetts Gov. Thomas Pownall seized control of the Penobscot River and the homelands of the Penobscot people by force.
Although all of these events took place before the Revolution, and Phips died in 1757, his legacy as a political figure, a landowner, and the patriarch of a rich and connected family helped to shape the ways in which Cambridge – and Massachusetts as a whole – viewed the place of both indigenous and enslaved Black peoples in the Revolutionary struggle and in what would emerge as the new nation, as well as helping to ensure that, after the Revolution, East Cambridge’s land would be consolidated enough to allow land speculator Andrew Craigie to purchase most of the area and create the Lechmere Point Corporation in 1808.
