A Walking Tour of Cambridge, Massachusetts

There is no better way to see America than on foot. And there is no better way to appreciate what you are looking at than with a walking tour. Whether you are preparing for a road trip or just out to look at your own town in a new way, a downloadable walking tour is ready to explore when you are.

Each walking tour describes historical and architectural landmarks and provides pictures to help out when those pesky street addresses are missing. Every tour also includes a quick primer on identifying architectural styles seen on American streets.

Cambridge is known the world over as the home of two legendary universities - Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In fact the town name that had originally been “Newe Towne” since it was settled in 1630-1631 as a new town upriver from Boston was changed to honor Cambridge University in England when it was selected in 1636 as the site for a school to train ministers for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. That school would become Harvard College that would come to so dominate the character of Cambridge that it would be observed in the late 1700s that, “This business of teaching, lodging, boarding and clothing and generally providing for the Harvard students was the occupation of the majority of the households of the Old Village.”

But while Harvard was busy churning out United States Presidents - seven - and becoming the most famous college in America, the town was busy as well, if not quite as celebrated. During the Industrial Age only Boston and Providence produced more goods than Cambridge. There was soap from the Lever Brothers Soap Works, one of the largest concerns in the country. There was glass from the New England Glass Company, founded in 1818 and operating the largest and most modern glassworks in the world in the 1800s. William Carter and his brothers and cousin were making more ink than anywhere in the world. There was the country’s first ladder factory and an immense ice cutting trade and caskets and books and boxes and crackers and the first mechanical egg-eater. There would eventually be eight times as many factory workers in Cambridge as students.

But Cambridge has always been regarded as an intellectual center rather than an industrial center so that is where our walking tour will concentrate and we’ll start at the center of it all, in Harvard Square...