Olympus-OM
[Top] [All Lists]

[OM] 6/5 fragment of my day (long!)

Subject: [OM] 6/5 fragment of my day (long!)
From: Joel Wilcox <jowilcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 05 Jun 2005 20:45:56 -0500
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
==============================================

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
Sponsored by Tako
Impressum | Datenschutz