ike many places that had interesting roles in our collective past, Opposition House is the kind of landmark you would walk right past and never notice. It's an ordinary-looking house in an ordinary-looking neighborhood. But it turns out to have been involved in an extraordinary controversy involving real-estate development, money, bridges, highways, roads, and Revolutionary War veterans.

At the time of the American Revolution, Cambridge was a small town with a population of less than 1,000. It was connected to Boston by what was called "the Great Bridge,” which spanned the Charles River more or less where the Lars Anderson Bridge today links JFK Street to Allston. The Back Bay hadn't yet been filled in, and about a third of what is now Cambridgeport was marshes or mud flats with only three families living in the entire area. It took the better part of a day to travel between Cambridge and Boston along the eight-mile route that crossed the Great Bridge and went through Brookline and Roxbury.

In 1792, a group of private investors came up with a plan for a more direct passage. They built the West Boston Bridge, roughly where the Longfellow Bridge is today, cutting the distance from Harvard Square to Boston from eight miles to about two and a quarter. The company charged tolls and the investors speculated extensively in real estate. Before they built the bridge, they also bought up most of Cambridgeport.

The new bridge radically changed traffic patterns, which affected the value of real estate investors had bought speculatively. That's where Opposition House comes in. To get people to the bridge, the West Boston Bridge Company began to plan new roads that would funnel people toward it, and where these roads went determined what real estate would gain value. Harvard Street, for example, was to connect the new bridge with Harvard Square. This made some people unhappy—including rich and well-connected Cantrabridgians like Judge Francis Dana.

“Commerce that had sprung up after the construction of the West Boston Bridge led to plans, violently opposed by Dana, for the extension of Harvard Street westward to the college from its terminus near the line of the Dana estate," recounts the Cambridge Historical Commission’s 1967 Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge. "To block further construction, the building known as Opposition House was set up during the night by a party of gentlemen. Nevertheless, Harvard Street was put through, and Dana sold the house and lot in 1807.”

Dana was one of the founding proprietors of the West Boston Bridge Company, which should have made him pleased with the success of the bridge. But he also owned the land around Lafayette Square—roughly where Main Street and Massachusetts Avenue meet—and he wanted the traffic going to the West Boston Bridge to pass through there, increasing his wealth. Harvard Street not only bypassed the area; it went too close to his own house.

So it appears that Dana had a group of men build a house in the middle of the road to sabotage his own company's new road. The road was built anyway and simply went around what came to be known as Opposition House.

Regardless of internal conflict, the bridge was a success and soon a second for-profit bridge was built to compete with it. The great rival of the West Boston Bridge was the 1807 Canal Bridge, also called the Craigie Bridge—now the dam on which the Museum of Science sits. This bridge was put up by the former apothecary general of the Continental Army under George Washington, Andrew Craigie. After the war, he'd made a fortune in real estate and financial speculation, bought and developed East Cambridge, and eventually moved into the Vassal estate that had been Washington’s headquarters during the siege of Boston (now called the Longfellow House).

The two bridge companies were involved in years of fierce competition, during which time many of the major roads through Cambridge were built to take traffic one way or the other. Mount Auburn Street was constructed to connect people coming from Watertown to the West Boston Bridge, and "Andrew Craigie and 35 others protested against the making of the road; and it would seem that violent measures were adopted to prevent it…” Meanwhile, Cambridge Street and O’Brien Highway (formerly called Bridge Street) both were built through the efforts of the Canal Bridge Corporation to bring travelers to its bridge. This resulted in the forming of a committee, made up of Francis Dana, Elbridge Gerry, Jonathan Austin, Royal Makepeace, and John Hayden, which presented to the General Court a “long and very energetic remonstrance” alleging that, “The inhabitants of Cambridge and Cambridgeport are deeply afflicted by the incessant machinations and intrigues of Mr. Andrew Craigie in regards to roads.”

Eventually, all these roads and bridges were taken over by different agencies of the government, and people stopped taking “violent measures” to prevent road construction. Opposition House was moved out of Harvard Street to its current location at 2-4 Hancock Place, off Hancock Street between Mass. Ave. and Harvard Street, in 1859 or 1860. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

Gavin Kleespies is director of the Cambridge Historical Society.