COVID-19 Memorial

March 2021 marks the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. To honor the Cantabrigians who have died, we are installing markers on the lawn of our headquarters, the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House. Each marker, a butterfly, a symbol of hope and the shape of Cambridge itself, represents a life lost to the virus and a missing piece…

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Brief History of the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House and Enslaved People

In July 2019, the Cambridge Historical Society formed a task force to examine the Society’s institutional history and make recommendations about how to confront the organization’s white privilege going forward. One of the first steps was to research the history of the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House (HLN) (currently the Society’s headquarters) and its owners. Were the owners…

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The Old Hooper-Lee House by Thomas Coffin Amory

From the Proceedings, Volume 16, p. 21-25 [The following is taken, by permission, from the little-known article by Thomas Coffin Amory (H. C. 1830) entitled “Old Cambridge and New,” in the Register of the New England Historic-Genealogical Society for July, 1871. It gives an interesting picture of the house some sixty years ago — very…

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The Hooper-Lee-Nichols House by Mary Isabella Gozzaldi

Read April 25, 1922 From the Proceedings, Volume 16, p. 18-20 This house has been sometimes called the oldest house in Cambridge, and its large central stack chimney shows that it belongs to an early period of New England architecture; but it was originally a farmhouse in Watertown, as Sparks street was the westerly limit…

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Living in the Hooper-Lee Nichols House

This August, former HLN House resident Malcolm Fraizer visited us with his daughter, Holly, and his grandchildren, Daniel and Ruth. While I know this building as my office, Malcolm called it home. It was fun for me to hear how the spaces were used back when it was a bustling household. For example, the Bosphorus…

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Life in the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House: The Emerson and Dow Years

BY STERLING DOW This paper is from the Cambridge Historical Society Proceedings for the Years 1976-1979, Volume 44 A native of Portland, Maine, Sterling Dow received his undergraduate and graduate education at Harvard, where he taught Classics and the history of ancient Greece until his retirement as John E. Hudson Professor of Archaeology in 1970.…

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Lights, camera, action…

2007 On a rainy weekend in April, the Chandler Room at the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House was transformed into a movie set. With its pine paneling and open hearth, it became the Charlestown home of John Harvard and his wife, Ann, for a reenactment of the final hours of Harvard’s life on September 14, 1638. The film,…

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