Word: sutton
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...pick up a copy of S.B. Sutton's Cambridge Reconsideredand look up "Irish," you will find an unusual reference: "pgs. 55-59, 94-96 and here and there throughout the book." There is perhaps on more fitting testimony to the history of the Cambridge Irish; from the 1830's, when they began landing at Boston Harbor and trickling into East Cambridge over Craigie's Bridge, they made part of the city their...
...site for a colony-wide synod called for the "purpose of opposing certain incipient tendencies towards Presbyterianism." The church was helpful not only as a standard of moral rectitude; it also set the boundaries of the city, in a manner described by Charles William Eliot II in S.B. Sutton's Cambridge Reconsidered: "The optimum area for a town was figured by the time-distance from a meeting house which would permit the farmer to milk his cows, harness old Dobbin, drive his family to the meeting house, endure a two-hour sermon berfore refreshment at the tavern, and drive home...
Cambridge prospered in the late 17th and early 18th century, largely a result of the influential people drawn by the College. And Cantabrigians, Sutton reports, "delighted in a display of wealth... They built mansions and created manicured landscapes, planted with exotic trees and shrubs imported from England and France." Certain of the settlers could even be accused of bad taste: Winthrop House, on the corner of Bow and Arrow streets, "became the gay social center of the pre-Revolutionary days" in spite, or perhaps because, of "two life-sized wooden figures of Indians in paint and feathers and armed with...
...city had grimmer moments, too. The vast wave of immigration in the 18th century stirred racial and class biases among the old Cantabrigians, and among the new as well. As Sutton explains, "the Irish, Portuguese, Italians, Poles and other immigrants who settled the Point and the Port had no interest in the aesthetic activities in Harvard Yard and did not care what Longfellow said to his butcher...
...cause of the boom was not more babies; it was more immigrants. S.B. Sutton reports that the voting list in 1822 contained 481 names, of which only four sounded even "vaguely foreign." Even as late as 1848, only 25 names sounded foreign, but by 1855 there were 1420 Irish and 587 Scots here. The Irish had begun settling in 1830, and after the potato famine their ranks swelled. By 1880, there were at least 15,000 first-generation immigrants, including 8366 from Ireland, 3981 from Canada and the West Indies, 1396 from England, 636 from Germany, 169 from Sweden...