The Cambridge of eighteen hundred and ninety-six: a picture of the city and its industries fifty years after its incorporation
Arthur Gilman, Ed.

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[194] and where it has remained to this day. Thus at length came to rest the perturbed spirit of Elijah Corlett's transformed, dismembered, and wandering school, not quite sure but it ought to claim a burial urn in the Cambridge High School, or in one or the other of its branches, but content, on the whole, to be known as the loyal ancestral shade of the Washington Grammar School. This is the reason why a brownstone tablet in the outer wall of the Washington building tells the reader that that school is the lineal descendant of the ‘faire Grammar Schoole’ of 1643.

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The Cambridge High schools.

In 1838 a high school was organized in Cambridgeport for the entire town, in a building erected for it at the corner of Broadway and Winsor Street. Its first teacher was Edward F. Barnes. This school, so I am informed by John Livermore, who was a member of the school committee as early as 1843, had girls as well as boys from its start. It was not convenient of access either for East Cambridge or for Old Cambridge. Moreover, it did not stand well in the graces of Old Cambridge. For two centuries the classical instruction of the town had had its home there under the eaves of the college. Corlett's tree was not to be pulled up by the roots and set out in a new and distant part of the town without a protest. Accordingly, the high school of 1838, although it was the town high school for five years, drew its pupils mainly from Cambridgeport.

In 1843, the Otis schoolhouse, ‘quite a magnificent structure,’ was completed for East Cambridge, and on its upper floor was opened a high and grammar school with Justin A. Jacobs and Miss Almira Seymour as teachers. At the same time, Richard T. Austin and Miss L. M. Damon were teachers in the ‘Female High School’ of Old Cambridge. Thus, in 1843, the three sections or wards of the town had each its high school, with a man for its principal and a woman to assist him. The high school of Ward One, as we have seen, was for girls. Inasmuch as it also contained girls of grammar school grades, it was as often called a high and grammar school as a high school. The high schools of Wards Two and Three were for both sexes, that of Ward Two being the only one in the town not associated with grammar school pupils.

In 1847, the plan of uniting the high school pupils of the