Posts Tagged ‘industry’
Riverside: A Rowing Club for Workers
By Richard Garver, 2011 Riverside Boat Club was founded in 1869 as a trade-based rowing club by workers, predominantly Irish, from The Riverside Press, which was located between River Street and Western Avenue. Its first boathouse was a disused press building. Rowing was one of America’s most popular sports at the time. Boston’s July 4…
Read MoreWhere Portuguese Families Found a New Home
By Sarah Boyer, 2013 Portuguese families from the North End of Boston and East Boston started to move into East Cambridge soon after the Civil War. Most of them had emigrated from the Azores, an archipelago 800 miles off the coast of Portugal, mainly from the largest island, São Miguel. Their numbers increased in the…
Read MoreNew Wine in Old Bottles
By Michael Kenney, 2017 Sunday brunch time and weekday happy hours, the courtyard at the corner of Broadway and Hampshire Street is a lively place, with hipsters and families enjoying the bars and restaurants grouped around the open brick-paved space. Hard to believe, but it was even more bustling a century ago, when shifts of…
Read MoreThe Downside of Progress
By Doug Brown, 2017 Cambridge has made a lot of things over the centuries, not all of them valuable. Our manufacturing history has its dirty, dangerous downside, and dealing with the hazards and by-products of production has always been a challenge in this jam-packed, 7.1-square-mile city. By the end of the 19th century, the technological…
Read MoreThe Reverend Jose Glover And The Beginnings Of The Cambridge Press (Part 2)
by John A. Harrer, 1960 This article can be found in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Historical Society Volume 38, from the years 1959-1960. The newly appointed printer, Samuel Green, having had no experience in his new trade, was at once confronted with the work of producing a small book that involved some problems not…
Read MoreThe Reverend Jose Glover And The Beginnings Of The Cambridge Press (Part 1)
by John A. Harrer, 1960 This article can be found in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Historical Society Volume 38, from the years 1959-1960. The most famous antiquarian sale of books America has known was held in the year 1879. None other has equaled it in the eighty years that have passed since then. The…
Read MoreEarly Glass Making In East Cambridge
by Doris Hayes-Cavanaugh, 1926 Much has been said recently about the business growth of Cambridge, and a number of publications have stressed the fact that Cambridge, and particularly the section known as East Cambridge, now stands very high in the scale of New England manufacturing centres. Imposing schedules of plants and factories have appeared, setting…
Read MoreElias Howe, Jr., Inventor Of The Sewing Machine (Part 2)
This article can be found in The Proceedings of the Cambridge Historical Society Volume 14, from the year 1919. The Victory Over Labor Mobs Starvation near his door and the $500 of George Fisher exhausted, Howe could now manufacture his machine for sale — if it would sell. To do this, he asked a practical…
Read MoreElias Howe, Jr., Inventor Of The Sewing Machine (Part 1)
Elias Howe, Jr., Inventor Of The Sewing Machine 1819-1919 A Centennial Address Born In A Cradle Of Invention The succession of master minds in a particular locality compels us to believe in the spiritual consanguinity of genius. It is an heredity much greater than that of blood. It is an heredity of spirit, that…
Read MoreThe Romance of Brick
by G. Burton Long, 1971 Brick is something that has been with us for centuries. There is an old maxim which says, “Familiarity breeds contempt,” and this might well be applied to brick, because it has been used as a building material throughout the ages, and we are prone to accept it without regard to…
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