City Readies for Celebration Of Cambridge's 350th Birthday

There's only one institution in this city older than Harvard--the city itself.

Cambridge will next month begin a year-long celebration of a history that started a decade before the first Harvard man received his diploma.

With bumper stickers and parades, Cantabrigians will honor Cambridge's 350th birthday. Actually, it's the 346th--the city founded in 1630 as Newtowne changed its name to honor the English college town on the banks of the Cam the same year that the Great and General Court granted Harvard its charter.

Cambridge's history includes much more than the University. Once it was a city of towering plants and coughing smokestacks--"we had a Ford plant cranking out Model T's on Memorial Drive," William Dickerson, a member of the Celebrations Committee, recalled.

Along the way Cambridge produced its share of notables: botanist Louis Agassiz, jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, actor Walter Brennan, cartoonist Al Capp and camera mogul Edwin Land. "Even Josiah Bartlett, the man who wrote Bartlett's Quotations, lived here," Dickerson said.

Harvard, of course, will join the celebration. The council appointed Lewis A. Armistead, acting assistant vice president for community affairs, to the celebrations committee last night, in part, members said, "because we want to use the Harvard archives, one of the best collections of Cambridge history around."

Some local historians, unwilling to get only facts surrounding the Revolutionary War, aren't stopping with written records. One ceremony, Dickerson said, may even commemorate the journey of Leif Ericson up the Charles River to the site of Mt. Auburn Hospital nearly 1000 years ago. Honest, there's even a placque that says he was there.