Harvard Hall itself, the fifth of the group then existing, was used mostly for storage, partly of the college property left behind (carefully guarded) and partly of food for the army, including barrels upon barrels of salt beef contributed by the neighboring towns.[1] Since it contained also the college kitchen—the like of which for size was unknown in all New England—it was of peculiar assistance to the commissary department. It was likewise of unexpected value to the ordnance branch: when it was rebuilt after being burned in 1764 its roof had been made as nearly fireproof as possible by a covering of lead; and a thousand pounds or more of this much-sought-for metal was now stripped off and run into bullets. The University, in short, had surrendered its premises to the temporal powers even more completely—and probably far less gracefully—than in the martial period from which it is now just emerging.
When all discoverable quarters, public and private, had been filled to capacity, and still more of the farmer-soldiers kept arriving, a miscellaneous shanty-town of tents, huts, and booths was run up all over the village. The Reverend William Emerson, of the class of 1761, has left a picture of the scene in terms considerably
- ↑ Harvard Book, i, 142. One of the first orders issued after the militia assembled in Cambridge was to post “a Centry between the Apparatus [chamber] and Library” in the upper corridor of Harvard Hall. Henshaw’s Orderly Book, April 26, 1775, in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proceedings, xv, 92.
