For many years, Concord, 32km northwest of Boston, was synonymous primarily with the American Revolution. British soldiers entered the town on April 19, 1775, to destroy arms and ammunition after a battle at nearby Lexington, but Paul Revere, a hero of the revolution, had forewarned residents.
The Minute Man statue, an 1874 work by sculptor Daniel Chester French, in Concord, Massachusetts, adjacent to the North Bridge. Photo: Shutterstock
The first bullet fired by the revolutionaries during the ensuing skirmish was immortalised decades later by Emerson in the Concord Hymn as “the shot heard around the world”, marking the beginning of the American War of Independence.
More than a century later, Concord, the home of Emerson, poet and leading exponent of New England transcendentalism, would become a centre of culture.
“Concord is among the oldest towns in America and became a literary town because of Emerson,” says author and resident Tom Brosnahan. “His grandfather had roots in Concord, and his parents lived in Boston.
“[Emerson] moved to the town in 1834 and became the most famous public intellectual in America.”
A mezzotint portrait of American writer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Photo: Shutterstock
Authors Hawthorne and Alcott, and sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850-1931; best known for his 1874 The Minute Man sculpture in Concord) all followed.
From 1879 to 1888, the town also hosted the Concord Summer School of Philosophy, a series of influential lectures founded by Amos Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May, at the Hillside Chapel, a small wooden building that still stands.
Emerson was friends with Amos Alcott, an innovative educator, and Concord-born Thoreau, says Brosnahan. “Emerson’s grandfather’s house was also rented to writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. So in the mid-1800s, Concord was home to several of America’s best-known writers and thinkers.”
The book cover of Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau. Photo: SCMP
The congregation of literary talent in one small town led American-British author Henry James to describe Concord as “the biggest little place in America.” Major works written here include Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Emerson’s essay Self-Reliance (1841) and Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and Civil Disobedience (1849).
Today’s Concord is the quintessential New England town, rich in houses dating back to colonial times – the mid-17th century Scotchford-Wheeler House was put up for sale for the first time in 300 years in 2022 – and independent shops selling candles, homeware, antiques, knick-knacks and souvenirs. Standing near the confluence of the Sudbury and Assabet rivers, the town is defined by its historic bridges and surrounding countryside, where woods turn vivid crimson, orange and gold as summer turns to autumn.
The best way to tour small, compact Concord is on foot, with the occasional car or bike ride, says Brosnahan, who runs walking tours that explore the town’s literary heritage.
We begin at The Wayside, the “home of authors”.
A vintage line drawing of novelist and poet Louisa May Alcott. Photo: Shutterstock
The two-storey, wood-frame New England farmhouse was altered by each of its famous residents: a teenage Louisa May Alcott lived here in the 1840s; Hawthorne, who named the house, made it his home in the 1850s and 60s; and author Harriet Lothrop, who used the pseudonym Margaret Sidney, took up residence here with her husband, a publisher, in the late 1800s.
It was while he was living at The Wayside, now part of the Minute Man National Historical Park (which primarily commemorates the beginning of the War of Independence), that Hawthorne wrote to a friend that he was “beginning to take root here, and feel myself, for the first time in my life, really at home.” And many experiences at Hillside – the name of the house when it was the Alcott home – were channelled by Louisa May into Little Women, including the sheltering of a fugitive slave in 1847.
Next door is the two-storey weatherboard farmhouse that Amos Alcott bought in 1857 for US$945. The grounds had 40 apple trees, which gave the home its name: Orchard House. Having moved more than 20 times in 30 years, the Alcotts had finally found their anchor, and lived in Orchard House until 1877.
The Orchard House, home to Louisa May Alcott’s family for 19 years, showcases period furnishings from that time. Picture: Visit Concord
A guide in period costume reveals that about 80 per cent of the furnishings on display in the house were once owned by the Alcotts. Among the artefacts in the formal parlour, with its earthy wallpaper and a green patterned carpet, is a piano; the dining room is hung with portraits of family members; and the kitchen houses a soapstone sink bought by Louisa May. Her room includes the half-moon shelf desk at which she wrote Little Women.
On the grounds is the Hillside Chapel, one of the first successful adult education centres in the country. Today, it is used for poetry readings, historical re-enactments and other events.
A vintage line drawing of American essayist, lecturer, poet and leader of the transcendentalist movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Photo: Shutterstock
About a mile away, the Old Manse, a Georgian weatherboard house, stands tall on the banks of the Concord River. Built in 1770 and home to Emerson’s grandparents, it overlooks the North Bridge, where the skirmish of April 19, 1775, took place. Although that structure was dismantled in 1788, the current arched wooden pedestrian bridge, the eighth iteration, is the restoration of a replica built in 1956.
Emerson wrote both Nature, the essay that founded the transcendentalist movement – an idealistic school of thought that believed in the unity of all creation, the innate goodness of humanity and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience – and Concord Hymn in the Old Manse.
The home was later bought by Hawthorne and his wife, who began their married life here.
“The recreated heirloom vegetable garden was originally planted by Thoreau in honour of the Hawthornes’ wedding”, says guide Laurie Evans. “Hawthorne wrote several short stories in the same room where Emerson worked and they were compiled in Mosses from an Old Manse. That’s where the house got its name.”
Emerson House, the house where Ralph Waldo Emerson lived from 1835 until his death in 1882, is now a museum that honours the author’s life and legacy. Photo: Shutterstock
A short walk away is the home Emerson brought his new bride (his second wife) to in 1835. Soon after, he wrote to his brother: “It is a mean place and cannot be fine until trees and flowers give it a character of its own. But we shall crowd so many books and papers and if possible, wise friends, into it that it shall have as much wit as it can carry.”
The couple lived for 47 years in the two-storey frame building – now known as Emerson House – and it would become the hub of the American transcendentalist movement. It is where Emerson met with like-minded writers including Thoreau and Amos Alcott.
A vintage line drawing of American essayist, poet, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau. Photo: Shutterstock
“The [perception] that it was Emerson’s chosen retreat – brought literary men here”, according to the 1905 book The Story of Concord Told By Concord Writers. “Around Emerson this circle […] gathered as friends and brothers or else as disciples – and thus the name of Concord became associated, and justly, with a special and remarkable school of thought and literature.”
Damaged by a fire in July 1872, the well-restored house now showcases furniture, books and artwork from Emerson’s time.
Next to Emerson House is the Concord Museum, 16 galleries devoted to the town’s Native American, revolutionary, cultural and literary history. Highlights include a recreation of Emerson’s study, including his books and furnishings, as it would have been at his death in 1882; the world’s largest collection of Thoreau possessions, including the bed, desk and chair from his cabin; and a lantern revolutionaries placed in the steeple of Boston’s Old North Church in 1775, to let the people of Lexington and Concord know that British troops were advancing.
To the east of town, on Virginia Road, is the colonial farmhouse in which Thoreau was born.
The farmhouse where Henry David Thoreau was born is now a museum, and the room in which he was born is available for rent as a writer’s retreat. Photo: Visit ConcordThe home – once known as the Wheeler-Minot Farm, and which provided inspiration for the naturalist’s writings – now hosts tours, author talks, writing workshops and nature walks, all with the intent of engaging with Thoreau’s ideas about “living deliberately.” The room in which the great transcendentalist was born is also available as a retreat for writers who may feel they need to be at one with all creation to find inspiration.
A six-minute drive away is the pond made famous by Thoreau’s Walden, which describes in detail his two years living the simple life in a cabin he built in the woods beside Walden Pond.
Back in the town centre, the Concord Free Public Library has served as a cornerstone of community life since Emerson delivered the keynote address at its dedication, on October 1, 1873.
Designed in the Gothic style, the structure was an architectural novelty at the time but has since undergone many alterations. Its high ceilings, large windows and many bookshelves are interspersed with busts, paintings, postcards and other memorabilia.The library functions as a public forum, with meeting rooms and a “makerspace”, a workspace in which townspeople learn, engage and create together.On racks and shelves in a dedicated section of the library are collections – books, transcripts, family papers, letters and newspaper clippings – devoted to Emerson, Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott and Hawthorne.
In an attempt to digest all this new information, I take a beat at Concord’s Colonial Inn, which dates back to 1716 and a time when the Tap Room was the town’s “men only” bar.
Concord’s Colonial Inn, which dates back to 1716, is often the site of historical re-enactments. Photo: Visit Concord
Over a bowl of steaming New England clam chowder, my server offers a word of advice: “Make time for the bookstores, including Concord Bookshop, which was opened in 1940, and Barrow Bookstore. There’s a wealth of gently loved treasures to take back.”
Bookstores perused, my literary stroll around Concord ends, fittingly, in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (not to be confused with the graveyard of the same name in New York, the final resting place of author Washington Irving and other famous Americans).
One of Massachusetts’ renowned “garden cemeteries” – those built a little out of town in parklike settings – Sleepy Hollow is home to another of French’s epic sculptures: Mourning Victory, created to honour three brothers from Concord who died in the American Civil War (1861-65).
Author’s Ridge, at Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, is home to the graves of the town’s most famous citizens: Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Photo: Visit Concord
In a scenic corner known as Author’s Ridge lie Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott, as close in death as they were in life, their graves often decorated with pens, pencils, notes and poems left by other literary explorers. In one sense, however, they live on. The hometown of a cohort of authors who shaped American literature continues to provide inspiration.
“Other writers have found our town a congenial place to live and work”, says Brosnahan. “[And] for 31 years, the Concord Festival of Authors has celebrated the written and spoken word, honouring the narrative arts with literary and performative programmes every October [this year: October 17 to 30].”
The last words on Concord should rightly go to Thoreau, who wrote in his journal in 1856 that he “never got over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world – and in the very nick of time, too”.
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Publish date : 2024-08-17 12:15:00
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