The shapshot below requires a bit of explanation. I had some offlist
discussion about a quick business trip I had to make recently to Boston
with Chuck Norcutt. I am sorry, Chuck, that I had no time for a little Oly
meeting. I hope there will be another opportunity. I wasn't even able to
call my nephew, who lives in the area, so please don't feel slighted!
I did use some information Chuck shared with me about Cambridge, which is
the part of contemporary Boston where Harvard and MIT hole up. He
mentioned a historical marker not far from Harvard Square. Anything about
the early days of Cambridge are of interest, since my first ancestors
arrived across the big waters and landed in early Cambridge, or Newtowne,
as it was known from its founding in 1631 until 1638. Not exactly sure
why the name was changed to Cambridge, though it was certainly a friendly
haven for the puritans back in old England.
These early Massachusetts communities were organized around churches, and
the Newtowne church was Thomas Hooker's church. Hooker was an important
and quite charismatic puritan divine, hunted by the archbishop in England
in that unhappy period preceding the kingless Commonwealth, and eventually
an exile first to Holland and then to Massachusetts. He appears to have
taken almost an instant dislike to the government as it was organized in
Boston and moved himself and his invalid wife and a good part of the
Newtowne congregation to Hartford, Connecticut. My grandfather 12
generations back and his family were on that 100 mile pilgrimage to
Hartford, the first major inland settlement in New England. The legal
system developed in Hartford is considered a precursor to that eventually
ratified by all the original 13 states as the U.S. Constitution.
I have yet to visit Hartford, of which my old sire is considered a founder,
but I told my colleagues at the meeting of my yearning to see anything that
might be seen of old Newtowne. We had 45 minutes after our last meeting
before we needed to catch a cab to the airport. One of my colleagues is an
MIT grad and knew the Harvard Square area very well, though mostly from pub
crawling and the like, so we took the subway the two stops to Harvard
Square and the search began, and during a raging nor'easter, no less. It
was not long before I found a little historical green space with a marker
which contained what you see here:
http://soli.inav.net/~jdub/day/day41.html
For all intents and purposes, this was the only photograph I made on the trip.
I was amazed at the fineness of the carving, which had to have been done by
artisans in the period between 1631 and 1638, wondering why and how such
effort and detail should have been given the marking of the "Newtowne
Market" in a place that surely required many other more significant uses of
the time and energy. Was it one of a hundred such signs that might have
lasted but didn't, or was the market something extraordinary?
I suspect my kin were probably gone by the time this ill-fated sign of the
Newtowne Market was carved. But I was glad to have seen it. Thank you,
Chuck. It is an extraordinary feeling.
By the time we made it back to our group, we had exceeded the 45 minutes
allotted for the little excursion to Harvard Square, and I was sweating
bullets through the silent treatment I was getting as we sat in traffic in
the cab. Fortunately, the cabbie rose to the occasion and we made our
flights in more than ample time.
Joel W.
==============================================
List usage info: http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies: olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================
|