Harvard Hall is destroyed by fire in Cambridge.

The fire, which breaks out at night in the middle of a snowstorm, is thought to have been caused by attempts to keep the building warm for a meeting of the General Court. It destroys the college library’s more than 4,800 valuable books and manuscripts, including all of those donated by Rev. John Harvard. The only book that survives is John Downame’s The Christian Warfare Against the Devil World, which had been borrowed without permission, by a student named Ephraim Briggs and subsequently returned and is today displayed at the Houghton Library.