Cambridge, Massachusetts (map) is a city in the Greater Boston area of Massachusetts, United States. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England. Cambridge is most famous for two prominent iversities, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As of the 2000 census, the city population was 101,355. It is the fifth most populous city in the state.
The site for what would become Cambridge was chosen in December 1630, and the first houses were built in the spring of 1631. The settlement was initially referred to as “the newe towne”. Official Massachusetts records show the name capitalized as Newe Towne by 1632. Located at the first convenient Charles River crossing west of Boston, Newe Towne was one of a number of towns (including Boston, Dorchester, Watertown, and Weymouth) founded by the 700 original Puritan colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony under governor John Winthrop. The original village site is in the heart of today’s Harvard Square. The marketplace where farmers brought in crops from surrounding towns to sell survives today as the small park at the corner of J.F.K. and Winthrop Streets, then at the edge of a salt marsh, since filled. The town included a much larger area than the present city, with various outlying parts becoming independent towns over the years: Newton (originally Cambridge Village, then Newtown) in 1688, Lexington (Cambridge Farms) in 1712, and both West Cambridge (originally Menotomy) and Brighton (Little Cambridge) in 1807. West Cambridge was later renamed Arlington, in 1867, and Brighton was later annexed by Boston, in 1874.
In 1636 Harvard College was founded by the colony to train ministers and the new town was chosen for its site by Thomas Dudley. By 1638 the name “Newe Towne” had “compacted by usage into ‘Newtowne’.” In May 1638 the name was changed to Cambridge in honor of the university in Cambridge, England. The first president (Henry Dunster), the first benefactor (John Harvard), and the first schoolmaster (Nathaniel Eaton) of Harvard were all Cambridge University alumni, as was the then ruling (and first) governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop. In 1629, Winthrop had led the signing of the founding document of the city of Boston, which was known as the Cambridge Agreement, after the university. It was Governor Thomas Dudley who in 1650 signed the harter creating Harvard College.
Cambridge grew slowly as an agricultural village eight miles (13 km) by road from Boston, the capital of the colony. By the American Revolution, most residents lived near the Common and Harvard College, with farms and estates comprising most of the town. Most of the inhabitants were descendants of the original Puritan colonists, but there was also a small elite of Anglican “worthies” who were not involved in village life, who made their livings from estates, investments, and trade, and lived in mansions along “the Road to Watertown” (today’s Brattle Street, still known as Tory Row). In 1775, George Washington came up from Virginia to take command of fledgling volunteer American soldiers camped on the Cambridge Common — today called the birthplace of the U.S. Army. (The name of today’s nearby Sheraton Commander Hotel refers to that event.) Most of the Tory estates were confiscated after the Revolution. On January 24, 1776, Henry Knox arrived with artillery captured from Fort Ticonderoga, which enabled Washington to drive the British army out of Boston.