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Elmwood, Cambridge, Massachusetts

WHERE JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL WAS BORN, AND WHERE HE DIED When Thomas Oliver, Lieutenant Governor and president of George III's provincial council, built his house in Cambridge about 1767, he did not dream that within nine years he would have to abandon it because of his allegiance to the same George III. But so it IN THE LAND OF THE PILGRIMS proved. He was a Tory, and his neighbors would not suffer him to remain among them. On September 2, 1774, he wrote his resignation of the offices he held, adding the statement, "My house at Cambridge being surrounded by five thousand people, in compliance with their command, I sign my name." At his request, made to General Gage and the admiral of the English fleet, troops were not sent to Cambridge, according to plan. "But for Thomas Oliver's intercession," Edward Everett Hale says, "Elmwood would have been the battleground of the First Encounters." After his summary departure the house was used as a hospital by the Continental Army. When the government sold it at auction it became the property first of Arthur Cabot, then of Elbridge Gerry, a Signer of the Declaration of Independence, Governor of Massachusetts from 1810 to 1812, and Vice-President under Madison.