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Gc 974.402 C74f 1717867
M. L.
REYNOLDS HISTORICAL GENEALOGY COLLECTION
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ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01105 8192
HISTORIC
CONCORD
A HANDBOOK OF Its Story and Its Memorials
WITH THE STORY OF The Lexington Fight
By ALLEN FRENCH
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The Monument of 1836, and across the Bridge the ' Minute Man '
HISTORIC
CONCORD
A HANDBOOK OF
Its Story and Its Memorials
WITH THE STORY OF!
The Lexington Fight
By ALLEN FRENCH
CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS
I 942
COPYRIGHT, 1942, BY ALLEN FRENCH
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM
Trell
Designed by JOHN WOODLOCK The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS · PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
Foreword
1717867
MODERN wars have turned the thoughts of Americans to the history of their country, rousing the desire to see not merely its famous places, but particularly those where our national spirit has been most prominently revealed. After the First World War this was proved in Historic Concord by the stream of visitors who came to see the North Bridge, where Americans first marched against the British who till that moment had been their fellow citizens. These pilgrim tourists found another interest in Concord, because of the famous authors who lived there, who were among the first to give permanent expression to American liter- ary ability. In their period equally famous American writers lived elsewhere; but as a literary group Emer- son, Thoreau, Hawthorne and the Alcotts are unsur- passed in our history. The Second World War is turn- ing the minds of our countrymen still more seriously to Concord's evidences of our national achievements. There is every reason to believe that, once the limita- tions to travel are lifted, in future the visitors to Con- cord will be more numerous than ever.
For the convenience of such visitors this handbook has been written in two sections, a Guide and a His- tory. As most tourists arrive in the town with little knowledge of how to see it, or with limited time at their disposal, the Guide section has been put first. The History could not be combined with it; but it should be read beforehand by those who have the leisure, and may be reviewed on reaching home. As a handbook the slight occasional repetitions are neces- sary, and the cross-references should be helpful.
Contents
GUIDE: Routes for the tourist to follow in seeing principal sights in Concord
GUIDE TO CONCORD, GENERAL
I
THE SQUARE
3
Colonial Inn
4 6
Hill Burying Ground
6
MONUMENT STREET
9
House with the Bullet Hole
IO
Old Manse IO
Battleground
13
Liberty Street (Buttrick relief; the Muster Field)
I8
LOWELL ROAD (BARRETT'S MILL AND FARM)
19
BEDFORD STREET (SLEEPY HOLLOW CEMETERY) 20
24
Public Library
25
Academy and Cheney Elms
25
Thoreau-Alcott House
25
Elm Street (F. B. Sanborn House)
26
South Bridge and Hosmer Cottage 26
Thoreau Texas House
27
WALDEN STREET AND WALDEN POND
27
LEXINGTON ROAD
29
First Parish Church, Art Center, Reuben Brown House 29
Emerson House
31
Wright Tavern
MAIN STREET (THE MILLDAM)
vi
Contents
Antiquarian House
32
Alcott House (Orchard House)
34
School of Philosophy
35 35
Hawthorne's 'Wayside'
Grapevine Cottage 37
Meriam's Corner
39
Thoreau Birthplace
40
HISTORY: A brief study of the first two hundred and fifty years
THE COLONIAL PERIOD
Topography
41 41
The Founding
42
King Philip's War
45
Governor Andros
46
THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
47
Preparations
47
Lexington
Guide to Lexington
Concord
Fob Shattuck
71
CONCORD IN LITERATURE
Emerson
Bronson Alcott
Louisa Alcott
84 86
Hawthorne
91 95
READING LIST
97
INDEX
IOI
Illustrations by Lester G. Hornby
50 56 59
73 73 8 I
Thoreau
Later Writers
GUIDE : Routes for the tourist to follow in seeing principal sights in Concord
GUIDE TO CONCORD, GENERAL
BY THE ordinary tourist Concord can be seen (sketch- ily, that is) in a visit of a few hours. Coming from Boston he can see Lexington and Concord, and return in the same day. A longer visit is desirable, however.
Concord, less than twenty miles from Boston, can be reached by train, bus, or automobile. Frequent trains come from the North Station in Boston, or stop when coming from the west via Troy and Fitch- burg. Street cars from the Boston Subway connect at Arlington Heights with busses for Lexington and Concord. Other busses start from Park Square, Bos- ton, and come through Lexington to Concord. Motor- ists can easily connect with Route 2, running north- westerly from Boston; or with Route 126, running north and south; or with Route 62, running north- easterly and southwesterly.
Lexington can be reached by turning off from Route 2 or 2A onto the combined Routes 4 and 25. Busses as above. There are a few trains from the North Station. The guide to Lexington in this book follows the account of Lexington Fight in the Historical Section [page 56].
As all the important streets in Concord come to- gether at Monument Square, this book uses it as a center from which to visit the sights of the town, and
2
Historic Concord
the tourist should make his way there. The busses all stop there, and Routes 62 and 126 pass through it. Route 2, however, by-passes the town, and motorists approaching from east or west should watch for signs directing to the center.
From the railroad the visitor may take a taxi or walk - about half a mile. Leaving the train and going to the other side of the station, he will see almost directly before him, at right angles to the tracks, a short street, Middle Street. Walking to its end, he turns left on Academy Lane. As he reaches Main Street, Concord Academy is opposite. Turning right on Main Street, he passes some of Concord's hand- somer houses, and (on the right) the Public Library [page 25]. A little farther on, he passes through Con- cord's short business center, the Milldam (the last block of Main Street), and reaches the Square.
Students of Thoreau who wish to see as many spots as- sociated with him as possible, may vary this walk as follows: Walking left from the station on Thoreau Street, they will first come to Belknap Street. Turning left on this and cross- ing the tracks, in about a hundred yards they will find the Thoreau Texas house [page 27]. Returning to Thoreau Street and proceeding as at first, the next street is Main Street, on which they should turn right without crossing. The third house is the Thoreau-Alcott house [page 25]. Main Street then leads to Academy Lane, on the nearer corner of which stands a house once occupied by the Tho- reaus. Just beyond Academy Lane, across Main Street, stands a square house also once occupied by the family. The Public Library, too, partly covers the site of a third house where the Thoreaus lived. Following along Main Street, the visitor then comes to the Square.
If the visitor will place himself, or imagine himself, at the northerly end of the Square, farthest from the
3
Guide
flagpole, he can orient himself. This end of the Square is occupied by the triple building of the Colonial Inn. As he stands with his back to the Inn, at his right Lowell Road leaves the Square, and at his left, Monument Street. In front is the Square proper, which is not square at all, but a grassy oblong. At the end of this a street cuts across the Square: to the right it becomes the Milldam, the beginning of Main Street. To the left it is Bedford Street. Beyond the oblong and the street is the triangle (with the flagpole) always considered a part of the Square. (Two little traffic triangles stand near by.) Beyond, Lexington Road runs directly away.
The five streets here named will, in this book, be considered one by one. The visitor naturally begins, however, with the Square itself.
THE SQUARE
Here the founders of Concord made their treaty with the Indians, under the great tree whose supposed loca- tion is marked, at the entrance to Main Street, by a tablet to 'Jethro's Tree' [page 43]. From the Square the Concord Company marched in 1689 to Boston to depose Governor Andros [page 46]. Here, many years later, came Paul Revere with messages to the patriot leaders - but not on the historic Nineteenth of April, 1775, for he had been captured by a British patrol in Lincoln. Here in the Square the British, on that day, halted their men, the leaders occupying the Wright Tavern [see pages 60 ff.] and doubtless hearing from there the volleys of the Fight. In 1786 Job Shattuck and his rioters held the Square for a few hours, in Daniel Shays' unsuccessful "'rebellion' [pages 71-72]. And, later, here came and went through many years
4
Historic Concord
the persons famous in Concord's literary history - Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott with his daughters.
The Square, then, is a good example of the heart of a New England town, where for more than three hundred years its activities have focused. Here in town meeting were debated and settled the questions vital to the town, with selectman, lawyer, farmer, businessman, and even the humblest inhabitant having his say and his vote. Here, before Con- cord ceased to be the shire town, were held the county courts on successive days when Concord virtually held a market and a fair until the courts adjourned. Here have been held many of the town's celebrations. And here today Concord gathers for the exercises on Memorial Day, or to sing carols on Christmas Eve.
The Colonial Inn. The Inn, already noted, is made up of three buildings, all of old date. As the visitor faces them, the one to the left once held the store and dwelling of Deacon White, beloved of children for his gifts of sweets, but dreaded by Sunday travelers whom he stopped until the Sabbath was over. The building on the right was once occupied by the Tho- reaus while Henry was in college, and here later dwelt his aunts, one of whom, it is said, slipped out at night to pay the tax for which he was arrested [page 90]. The old buildings are now combined into a modern hotel. In the building next to them on Monument Street John Thoreau, the father, kept store in the eighteen- twenties.
On the grass-plot in the Square are three war- monuments. The nearest was erected to Concord's men dead in the Spanish War, the second (the obelisk) to the men of the Civil War, the third to those of the
r
.
ILAMS:
.
The Old Colonial Inn-Deacon White's Corner
6
Historic Concord
first World War.' The buildings around the Square are of no historic note,2 except for the Wright Tavern at the farther end. This was built in 1747, and was for many years used as an inn until, in the early nine- teenth century, it was long turned to private pur- poses, some of the time as a bakery. It is now once more an inn and a restaurant. The main part of the building is original.
The Wright Tavern. This is noted for having been the headquarters of the British on the Nineteenth of April, 1775, during their brief possession of the town. The officers who occupied the tavern were waited on by the proprietor, Amos Wright. Though he main- tained the house for but a single year, his name has clung to it. On the retreat of the companies from the Fight at the North Bridge, there was much confusion in the Square and at the tavern, until after a delay of two hours the troops were at last put in column and started for Boston, only to be attacked at Meriam's Corner and driven under fire from the town. [For more of these events see pages 60-63; 68-69.]
The Hill Burying Ground. Beside the Roman Catholic Church on the corner of Bedford Street is
I The boulder to the World War dead came from the Nelson Farm in Lincoln, and stood in such a position that it may have been used as a cover for Americans firing at the retreating British. But there is no foundation for any story connecting it with a definite person.
2 The buildings on the Square are, on the left (looking away from the Colonial Inn) an insurance building, once the courthouse; the Townhouse, with the present courtroom, town offices, and police station; and (across Bedford Street) the Roman Catholic Church. On the right are the brick Masonic Lodge, once a schoolhouse; Mon- ument Hall; and the residence of the Catholic priest, next to which is the great board (the 'glory board') with the names of men enrolled for the First World War. Here stood the Middlesex Hotel of Emer- son's day; and this was most probably the much-disputed site of the house of Peter Bulkeley [page 19].
7
Guide
the Hill Burying Ground, climbing the ridge. [For the ridge see pages 39, 41, 94.] It is on this slope that Pitcairn and Smith are represented in Doolittle's famous engraving of 1775 as looking over the country while the British regulars parade in the Square below. On top of the ridge, within the cemetery, once stood Concord's first meetinghouse, around which were the earliest gravestones, now weathered away. No stone of any of the town's founders remains. As one climbs the path one passes the altar-shaped monument to William Emerson, grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emer- son. [See pages 10, 29 ff., 60, 66.] Farther up, on the right, are rows of interesting tablets, mostly in the wonderful English slate from which a century and more of New England weather has not effaced the slightest scratch of the stonecutter's tool. Their simple and often quaint designs, and the graceful lines of willow branch or other decoration, relieve the gloom of skull and hourglass, while the epitaphs record the strict virtues and homely achievements of Concord worthies. Here are the graves of Colonel Barrett and Major Buttrick, who commanded at the Fight. [See pages 18, 20-21, 48, 64-66.]
Yet, however notable were the excellencies and the social positions of these pillars of the town, their memorials are less celebrated than one erected to a man who was perhaps the least important of the peo- ple of Concord in a day when slavery was still legal in Massachusetts. If the visitor turns left, away from the handsome stones, and crosses a low shoulder of the ridge toward the rear of the near-by church, he will come upon a stone standing by itself, among lilies planted in antislavery days, the stone to John Jack, a slave before the Revolution. In a time when literary feats were more acclaimed than now, this epitaph,
In the Hill Burying Ground
9
Guide
written by the Tory Daniel Bliss, was admired as an example of antithesis; it was copied and sometimes translated. Today it can be no less admired, but rather as a summary of an humble life thus skillfully, and even touchingly, rescued from oblivion.I
MONUMENT STREET
Leaving the Hill Burying Ground, walking to the farther end of the Square, and turning to the right, the visitor is on Monument Street. This is the road taken by the British light infantry who on the morning of the Nineteenth of April, 1775, marched to occupy the North Bridge and search the Barrett house [page 63]. The American militia had already passed that way, retreating before the greater numbers of the
I The stone, an old reproduction, has been recently recut. The inscription reads:
'God wills us free, man wills us slaves. I will as God wills, God's will be done. Here Lies the body of John Jack A native of Africa who died
March 1773, aged about sixty years.
Tho' born in a land of slavery,
He was born free.
Though he lived in a land of liberty He lived a slave,
Till by his honest, tho' stolen labors,
He acquired the source of slavery,
Which gave him his freedom,
Tho' not long before Death the grand tyrant,
Gave him his final emancipation,
And set him on a footing with kings. Tho' a slave to vice,
He practised those virtues
Without which kings are but slaves.'
IO
Historic Concord
British. The street, even today, has still a semi- rural aspect. The two houses upon it which are of particular interest are a half mile from the town, well beyond the little-used railway that crosses the road a third of a mile from the Square.
The House with the Bullet Hole. First of these houses is, on the right and upon a little knoll, the House with the Bullet Hole, the Elisha Jones house, easily identi- fied by its yellow color, its unshingled front, and the old sycamore before it. (The house is not open to the public.) Jones [see pages 60, 68] had quitted the mili- tia to stay with his family. Before the Fight, when regulars came to his well for water, he wisely kept him- self out of sight. But as the fleeing redcoats passed the house on their return, he recklessly showed himself in the doorway of the ell. One of the soldiers shot at him: the mark still shows some three feet to the left of the door, under a diamond-shaped pane of glass. Jones's little daughter, from a cellar window, watched the regulars hurry by, some of them limping and bleeding. A portrait of her in old age is at the Anti- quarian House.
The 'Old Manse.' A few rods beyond the Jones house, on the left, is the gateway to the Old Manse, which stands at the end of an avenue of trees.1 The house was so named by Hawthorne because until his coming in 1842 it had been occupied by none but ministers, and manse is, in Scotland, the name for a minister's house. It was built in 1769 by William Emerson, the patriotic minister. [See pages 7, etc.] On the morning of April 19, 1775, Emerson retreated from the town with the militia, but, like Jones, went
I The Manse is usually open to visitors from the 19th of April to November IIth. Admission twenty-five cents, but fifteen cents to children or people in groups of twenty or more.
II
Guide
to his own house to stay with his family. He com- forted the people of his parish who had taken refuge there, watched the Fight from the height of his own land, and wrote of the American dead, 'I saw them fall.' At the Manse on that day we must think of the reproachful wife at her window, the frightened women and children outside, and the militant minister eagerly watching the march of the Americans, to make sure that they returned the British fire.
After William Emerson's death while chaplain in the army, his successor, who married the widow and bought the Manse, was Ezra Ripley, for many years minister in Concord when church and town were one. When the people objected to his marrying a woman much older than himself, he declared he would per- form no marriages unless his were allowed. They capitulated. In those days every minister was farmer too, and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Ripley's step- grandson) describes him getting in his hay when a thunderstorm was coming up. Emerson and the hired man were with him. 'He raked very fast, then looked at the cloud, and said, "We are in the Lord's hand; mind your rake, George! We are in the Lord's hand;" and seemed to say, "You know me; this field is mine, Dr. Ripley's, - thine own servant!"'
He was a strong Sabbatarian. One Sunday morning, after a heavy fall of snow, his neighbor Buttrick from up the road came with his yoke of oxen breaking out the way to town. To help the minister get to church he turned in at the Manse gate; but Dr. Ripley, from his door, shouted a rebuke for laboring on the Sab- bath. Buttrick turned back and went on to town, leaving the pastor to get out of his long driveway as best he might.
Dr. Ripley was a historian of the Fight. When
I2
Historic Concord
in 1794 the road to the Bridge was abandoned, he came into possession of it, and loved to tell the story of that famous happening on his own ground. Then, when in 1836 the monument was erected on the nearer side of the river, he gave the land back to the town.
Ralph Waldo Emerson [see pages 20, 31, 73] was often at the Manse, where he wrote his first book, 'Nature,' sitting in the parson's clumsy writing chair, now at the Antiquarian Society. When Ripley died, Hawthorne next occupied the Manse [page 91], and after him Ripley's son Samuel, whose wife Sarah was one of the remarkable women of her day, famous for her scholarship when few women studied the classics. A helpmeet to her husband in both home and school, she is said to have tutored a student in Greek while rocking the cradle and shelling peas. A portrait of her is in the Public Library.
For another ninety years the Manse came down in the Ripley family, until in 1939 it became the prop- erty of the Trustees of Public Reservations. This long descent in the same family accounts for the un- usual preservation of the Manse in all but its original condition, for only when Samuel Ripley came was any of the older furniture auctioned off, to make room for some of his own. The Manse presents, then, the home through generations of a family of moderate means but high intellect, and hands down to us untouched the picture of earlier times. It speaks in every room and corner of its former occupants and their way of life, displaying in limited space their furniture, their books, their pictures, their simple and even severe daily routine, their active and lofty thought. No one can leave the Manse without a clear and sympathetic understanding of both the men of the Revolution and
13
Guide
the generation that produced what Van Wyck Brooks has called the 'Flowering of New England.'
There is not much elbowroom in the Manse. The rooms are small, the stair and hallways narrow. But the furniture is all of that excellent quality which was produced in a small town where the elegancies of the Georgian period were reduced to their structural best. The Saints' Chamber for visiting ministers is Spartan, and the lack of conveniences makes the modern man realize the difference between the present and the past, when the well was the source of water, fireplaces gave the only heat, and when in winter steam from the washtubs condensed to frost on the servant's hair.
Mrs. Hawthorne's writings, made with her dia- mond on the windowpanes, casual records, are charm- ing reminders of her life in the Manse. One such in- scription is in the room which both Hawthorne and Emerson used as their study.
The Battleground. The motorist, after leaving the avenue of the Manse, must turn left and enter the town parking space, almost in front, for cars are not allowed in the Battleground. Parking is free. Cross- ing Monument Street on foot and entering the second avenue, the visitor is on the road of 1775, which here turned a sharp corner and made directly for the river, where the North Bridge gave the only access to the northern part of the town. [See frontispiece.]
The visitor first meets, at the bottom of the slope, a granite obelisk dated 1836. Its old-fashioned in- scription, stating that here was the 'first forcible resistance to British aggression,' is an echo of the con- troversy of 1825 between Concord and Lexington, each striving for the greater glory. Common sense has long agreed that there is honor enough for both.
To the left of the monument, by the wall, is a little
14
Historic Concord
space enclosed by posts and chains, with two rough stones and a tablet to the two British soldiers who were buried here after the Fight. The verses on the tablet are by James Russell Lowell. The British Captain Parsons, returning with his regulars from searching the Barrett farm [see pages 19, 63, 68-70], found the place empty of all but these two, one of whom, in ad- dition to a bullet wound, had received cuts about the head. Rejoining their comrades in the Square, Par- sons' men reported what they had seen. The rumor spread that the man had been scalped, and the belief made the regulars more savage on the retreat. The man had not been scalped, however. He had been cut on the head by a youth who, coming with a hatchet in his hand from the Manse where he had been chop- ping wood, found the wounded soldier trying to rise, and in fear or mistaken patriotism had inflicted fur- ther wounds.
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