Posts Tagged ‘industry’
Printing In Cambridge Since 1800
by Norman Hill White, Jr., 1920 This article can be found in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Historical Society Volume 15, from the years 1920-1921. From 1692, when Samuel Green retired as manager of the college press, there was no printing done in Cambridge for over a hundred years, except that done by the brothers…
Read MoreThe Riverside Press by James Duncan Phillips
The Riverside Press By James Duncan Phillips Vice President And Treasurer Of Houghton Mifflin Company Read 27 April, 1926 In Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables he makes that delightfully simple old character, Uncle Venner, say, “In two or three years longer, I shall think of putting aside business and retiring to my farm. That’s…
Read MoreCambridge, A Pioneer Home Of Electronics
By Harold B. Richmond*Read October 28, 1952 As a sort of Christmas present last year, my very good friend and a distinguished citizen of Cambridge, the late Elmer A. Noden, appeared one day in my office to inquire if I would be the next speaker at the Cambridge Club and talk on the general subject…
Read MoreWhen Sweet Flavors Filled the Air
by Michael Kenney When Orra L. Stone compiled his History of Massachusetts Industry in 1930, he counted no less than 29 candy-manufacturing firms in Cambridge. There were giants like the New England Confectionary Co., whose 1,400 workers produced some 500 varieties of candy, including the iconic NECCO wafers, at its plant on Massachusetts Avenue, and…
Read MoreThe Cyclotron by Bruce Irving
For nearly 65 years, the corner of Oxford and Hammond streets was the home of a nuclear family quite unlike the others in the neighborhood. This one was large, mostly male, heavy on the PhD’s (with a few Nobel Prize winners thrown in), and housed in a pair of buildings called the Harvard Cyclotron Laboratory…
Read MoreSelf-Guided Tour: Clay, Bricks, Dump, Park: A Tour of North Cambridge
This tour begins with glacial time – 10,000 years ago when ice left behind vast deposits of clay in North Cambridge, then fast-forwards 9,800 years to the neighborhood’s brickmaking heyday, and the dump left in its wake. Clay shaped one of Cambridge’s biggest industries, and the lives of North Cantabrigians for generations. Take a walk through North Cambridge to find out how.
Read MoreCars in Cambridge by Doug Brown
With air bags, anti–lock brakes, traction control, and GPS, the Uber driver of today operates a very different machine from the family chauffeur’s open–topped horseless carriage of 100 years ago. But regardless of the generation, Cantabrigians have always loved working on cars. Today that tinkering is just as likely to occur in a university lab…
Read MoreThe Remarkable John “Jack” Emerson: Founder of the J. H. Emerson Company
By Daphne Abeel, 2005 When Will and George Emerson begin to talk about their family background and their father, who founded the J. H. Emerson Company, they mention somewhat offhandedly that they are descended from a brother of Ralph Waldo Emerson and that their paternal grandfather was related to the artist Maxfield Parrish. But it…
Read MorePast History Café – Candy, Soap, or Beer? The Working Life in The Port Neighborhood of Cambridge
Tuesday, 05/09/17, 5:30–8:00pm 5:30–6:30pm Walking Tour:Tour The Port with Marian Darlington-Hope; focusing on the manufacturing history, and workers’ lives in The Port, through time. Tour starts in front of Lamplighter Brewing Company at 5:30pm sharp. Please show up by 5:25. 6:45–8:00pm History Café:Cayla Marvil will tell Lamplighter’s story of making beer in Cambridge today. Learn…
Read MoreFort Washington, 1775-1975, and Other Cambridge Fortifications
By Douglas Payne Adams and Charles Sullivan, with an introduction by Charles W. Eliot, 2nd Presented June 1, 1975 Mr. Eliot Of the fortifications which were constructed in Cambridge two hundred years ago, a single battery—Fort Washington —still exists. Lieutenant-Governor Oliver had been forced to resign on September 2, 1774, and by the following spring—after…
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