Cambridge, Massachusetts
A Short History of Cambridge
From a fortified Puritan village called Newtowne to the home of the first American college, the first printing press in the colonies, and one of the densest concentrations of scientific talent on Earth.
Before the City
Long before any English settlement, the land along the north bank of the Charles was the home of the Massachusett people, who lived around the bay for thousands of years. Waves of epidemic disease between 1616 and 1619, carried by earlier European contact, killed a devastating share of the region’s Indigenous population in the years just before the Puritans arrived.
Newtowne and the First College (1630 to 1638)
In December 1630, Massachusetts Bay colonists laid out a fortified, grid-planned town they called Newtowne. In 1636 the General Court voted to found a college there, the first institution of higher learning in what would become the United States. It was named for John Harvard, a young minister who died in 1638 and left the school his library and half his estate. In 1638 the town itself was renamed Cambridge, after the English university many of the colonists had attended.
The First Press (1638 to 1639)
A printing press shipped to the colony in 1638 was set up in Cambridge and running by 1639, the first in British North America. In 1640 it produced the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in the English colonies. For more than a century, Cambridge was the only place in the region where anything could be printed at all, which made it a center of ideas long before it was a center of industry.
Three Villages Become a City (1846)
For two hundred years Cambridge grew as separate settlements: Old Cambridge around Harvard, plus Cambridgeport and East Cambridge nearer the river, each with its own character and rivalries. In 1846 the state united them into a single city. The 1800s brought heavy industry to the riverfront, including the New England Glass Company, once one of the largest glassworks in the world, and later a cluster of candy makers, NECCO among them, that gave one stretch of Main Street the nickname “Confectioners Row.”
Science Comes to the River (1916)
In 1916 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology moved across the river from Boston to a new campus on filled land in Cambridge. Paired with Harvard, MIT turned the city into a magnet for scientists and engineers. Decades later, the old factory district around Kendall Square was reborn: beginning in the 1980s it became the heart of the global biotechnology industry, and today more drug research happens within a few blocks of the MIT campus than almost anywhere on the planet.
A City That Argues About Fairness
Cambridge has long fought out national questions on its own streets. In 1941 it adopted proportional representation for city elections and, alone among American cities, kept it. In 1981 it became the first district in the country to replace neighborhood school assignment with “Controlled Choice,” balancing schools by choice rather than by zip code. And in 1994 a statewide ballot question ended rent control: Cambridge voters opposed it by a wide margin, but the statewide result overrode the city, reshaping who could afford to live here. The arguments continue, which is exactly the point of a civic life.
Sources: City of Cambridge; Cambridge Historical Commission; History Cambridge; Harvard University; MIT; Library of Congress.