Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called the "King's Highway" or "Tory Row" before the American Revolutionary War,[1] is the site of many buildings of historical interest, including the modernist glass-and-concrete building that housed the Design Research store,[2] and a Georgian mansion where George Washington and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow both lived (though at different times), as well as John Vassall and his seven slaves including Darby Vassall.

Through this forest ran the trail or path from Charlestown to Watertown, nearly coinciding with the crooked line Kirkland - Mason - Brattle - Elmwood - Mount Auburn; this was the first highway from the seaboard into the inland country.

Brattle tried to keep peace between patriots and the British, but after the 1774 incident known as the Powder Alarm, an angry mob surrounded his house and forced him to flee.

[11] The Baroness Riedesel, whose husband commanded the Brunswick regiments that supported the British, spent much of the wartime "imprisoned" at 149 Brattle Street, the old Tory Row mansion now commonly called the Lechmere-Sewall-Riedesel House.

The owners of these were in the habit of daily meeting each other in the afternoons, now at the house of one and now at another, and making themselves merry with music and the dance,— living in prosperity, united and happy, until, alas!

[17] Longfellow's wife Frances, also called Fanny, was the first American woman to receive anesthesia during childbirth, giving birth in the house at 105 Brattle Street.

[13] Longfellow and his wife Frances had two sons as well as the three daughters memorialized in his 1860 poem "The Children's Hour" as "grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, and Edith with golden hair."

James Russell Lowell, writing in 1868, conjured up Brattle Street (the "Old Road") as it was in the 1830s, seen from the top of a hill near where Mount Auburn Hospital stands now:[20]On your right, the Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt-meadows, darkened, here and there, with the blossoming black-grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow.

If it were early June, the rows of horse-chestnuts along the fronts of these houses showed, through every crevice of their dark heap of foliage, and on the end of every drooping limb, a cone of pearly flowers, while the hill behind was white or rosy with the crowding blooms of various fruit-trees.