Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/333

 priated by the remaining inhabitants, and went up in smoke on their hearthstones. A group of the “shops and stores” on Cambridge Common, however, seems to have been kept in serviceable condition, and used for the preservation of the considerable accumulation of more cumbersome and less valuable warlike material left behind in 1776 and subsequently added to from time to time. In particular, the old “laboratory” or magazine remained for many years on the westerly end of the Common at the corner of Waterhouse and Garden Streets. As early as 1777 Anburey calls Cambridge “now only an arsenal for military stores.”

This curiously bellicose reputation for a quiet university town persisted for some time. The results were unexpectedly practical; for when in 1796 the State of Massachusetts decided to establish an arsenal of its own, it turned to Cambridge, and selected a site on Garden Street only a few rods beyond the Common. Hither some of the old store-sheds were probably moved (as their contents certainly were) to serve until the later erection of the brick buildings still remembered by ancient Cantabrigians. For a time this local Campus Martius cut a great figure. In 1817 old Professor Waterhouse, of the Medical School, who had seen the barracks built, wrote in a strain plainly reminiscent of the original conditions: