Brattle, Farwell

The eastern(ish) end of Brattle Street1 is Brattle Square, just a couple of short blocks from Appian Way. They’ve prettied it up a lot since the Sixties, and it’s in many ways a functional (western) extension of “Da Squayah.”2 Farwell Place, the unimpressive little dead-end street shown below, lies mid-way from Appian Way to Brattle Square and is one of very few streets that bear today the same names as in 1650. It ends at the Old Cambridge Burying Ground, about which much more elsewhere. Like a scary number of places in Middlesex County, it’s named after a family member.3

When I lived at MIT, , and when we lived on Beacon Street, we hardly ever entered The Yard, except to go to concerts at Sanders Theatre or to insult the dignity of John Harvard’s bronze image. Subway, bus, bicycle, and shank’s mare brought us here more than once a week, but we focussed then on Boston and on the MIT end of Cambridge.

1Tory Row, in late colonial times 2Harvard Square, in case you’re a real furriner. 3Not sure which Farwell, though I suppose I could find out, but my 10th great-grandparents Henry Farwell and Olive Welby Farwell were among the New Towne’s first settlers. Like many early Cantabrigians, they didn’t stay, but moved on to Concord and then to found Chelmsford, to the north. Olive, as it turns out, is our documented immigrant link to the Plantagenets. Their grandson, my 9th great-uncle John Farwell, is buried in the Burying Ground at the end of the street, having died in 1709, aged 23, while traveling through Cambridge.

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