Still, a university is not ungrateful. When at the breaking out of the Civil War the students organized a “drill club,” one of its chief functions was “to guard the arsenal”; though one may imagine many an ironical undergraduate performing this curious reversal of parts with his tongue in his cheek. Nor did the Commonwealth make much serious use of the premises. A few cartridges were manufactured there, but little else was accomplished. Indeed, long before the coming in of the present century the whole property was abandoned and only the name “Arsenal Square” now survives. From the antiquated rubbish then disposed of, however, were salvaged the three old siege guns now on Cambridge Common: they form therefore the only extant “exhibit” of the contents of the Revolutionary “shops and stores” which once stood on the same spot. In the course of one hundred and fifty years they probably have not moved a quarter of a mile.
Of the shops themselves, what appears to be the last survivor—the old “laboratory”—can be unmistakably descried in a water-color sketch of the Common made by Joshua Green of the class of 1784, and preserved in the Harvard Library. It is represented as about eighty or ninety feet long, with four chimneys. In front of it is a high board-fence, with a little cottage at the right-hand end, presumably one of the original
