The Rites of Passage

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After nine months away, being back feels really strange.

Home has an odd duality, so familiar I can navigate with my eyes closed yet also very different to how I remember it.

T.S. Eliot once stated that someone really can’t know their home until they go away, and it’s certainly true for me.





I finally decided how to handle these feelings, with one last day of exploration.

Like most Massachusetts kids, we learned about the start of the Revolution: Paul Revere’s ride, the Battle of Bunker Hill, and so forth.

In grade school, we visited most of those sites.

I haven’t been back since.

One of the ironies of travel is many people seek out things on the road that they skip right over at home.

I went to Concord for the first time in over three decades.

Concord Museum

I began at a place I never visited in grade school, the Concord Museum.

Situated in a three century old house, it covers the history of the town.

Concord is really only famous for two things, and the museum has extensive artifacts on both of them.





The town was started in 1645 thanks to its location, near where the Assabet and Sudbury Rivers merge into the Concord River.

Native Americans used the area as a trading center.

After the English arrived, they took it over.

Concord was the first settled town in New England away from the coast.





The displays take the unusual approach of telling the history through individual biographies.

The main tribe in the area was a group of Algonquins.

They were led by a female chief, who is listed as ‘Squaw Sachem’ in English records.

She signed a treaty formally transferring Concord to the English.

Afterward, the town was led by Peter Bulkeley, a Puritan minister who fled England over his religious beliefs.

The display has one of his bibles.

He fathered a long line of ministers and religious thinkers, most of who lived in Concord.

One of them, William Emerson, was head minister in town at the time the Revolutionary War started.





Concord’s starring role in the start of the Revolution happened thanks to its location.

Those opposed to British rule believed it was only a matter of time until the Royal Governor tried to seize their supplies.

Concord was located away from the coastal towns where most British soldiers were based and had good road links to the rest of New England.

Very quietly, local militiamen turned Concord into a supply depot.





As the displays make clear through diaries and other material, life in Concord during this period was quite different to the version in grade school lessons.

The town had loyalists, and the buildup to war split society apart.

Diaries describe family members trying to decide where they stood, sometimes opposing their own relatives.

Things came to a head when revolutionaries circulated a petition to support a local militia; signing it meant a possible death sentence from the British, and not signing it meant social ostracization.





On April 18, 1775, the British finally made their move.

Here too, the real events are much more complicated than the school version.

Revolutionaries had set up a warning system for just these events.

Most people now view it as Paul Revere riding through the countryside all night, shouting “The British are Coming!”

In reality, militiamen had set up an entire system of dozens of riders, where each one was responsible for telling others so the message spread as far as possible.

The museum has a full map.





Even more ironic, Paul Revere was actually captured by a British patrol west of Lexington!

William Dawes, not Revere, delivered the warning to the area around Concord.

As historians have lamented for a century plus now, people credit Revere instead of Dawes because Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used the former’s name in his famous poem, simply because it rhymed better.





After a skirmish early the next morning in Lexington, the “shot heard round the world”, the British army arrived in Concord to confiscate the supplies they viewed as illegal.

Local militia was waiting for them, beyond a river crossing just north of town called the North Bridge.

They charged the British forces and sent them running.

As the army retreated, colonial militias from surrounding towns responding to the call from the previous night harassed the British regulars all the way to safety in Boston, killing over a hundred soldiers.

The revolution was on.

Believe it or not, that single battle was the only action Concord saw during the entire war, and it made the town famous.





Concord’s other moment in the historical spotlight occurred a half century later, when it became the birthplace of an American literary movement.

Two factors converged at the time, Transcendentalism and the search for a native American literature.

The later was driven by many intellectuals’ need to differentiate their country’s artistic traditions from Europe.

The former was sparked by religious philosophers, many Unitarian ministers based near Boston (themselves inspired by groups that had broken away from the Puritans).

Movement members believed that all living things are essentially connected, and true knowledge can only come from spiritual insights.





Ralph Waldo Emerson, a grandson of William Emerson and Concord resident, was highly active on both fronts.

He published a series of essays on Transcendentalism that were widely read in America.

Other authors became enamored with his ideas and journeyed to Concord to seek his advice.

Emerson hosted many of them at his house and gave them place to work.

Before long, Emerson and the town became host to a literary colony.

Its most famous members, beside Emerson, were Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott.

These authors wrote groundbreaking books that changed the direction of literature in the United States; books so important teachers torture high school students with them to this day.





The museum has a recreation of Emerson’s study, where so many of those discussions took place.

It looks like a well apportioned Colonial room, with everything a gentleman could need.

It has shelves and shelves of books, most of which Emerson actually owned.

For obvious reasons, all of it is behind glass.

Near it sits an old iron bed frame and a battered wooden desk.

Both of these were used by Henry David Thoreau while he lived at Emerson’s house.

They also have the desk used by Nathaniel Hawthorne.





With this literary legacy, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find a temporary show on literary Christmas trees.

The museum invited local designers to pick a children’s book and then decorate a tree in the theme of the book.

One author did their own tree.

The books are mostly contemporary instead of classics, so I didn’t recognize any of them.

I suspect that would have helped understanding the symbolism.





The other temporary show was called ‘Crowdsourcing a Collection’.

The museum invited various notable people to pick objects that had meaning for them, which were then displayed together in a show.

As expected, the results were all over the place, and a little incoherent.

The artifacts included a wooden plow and early sculptures by Daniel Chester French.

The centerpiece was a plain lantern that most think was one of two held up at Old North Church to warn the British were marching to Concord.

Next to it is the affidavit from the donor stating he bought it from the church sexton, who testified it was one of the two lanterns used that night.

Old Manse

After the museum, I drove to a place that I probably did see back in grade school, but have no memory of, the Old Manse.

This was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house, where he helped forge the future of American literature.

Remarkably, it’s located right next to the road to the Old North Bridge, which had washed out by Emerson’s time.

The house is restored at this point, which is expected since so many artifacts are now in museums.





The house, for the most part, looks like a typical colonial.

It’s larger than average, showing Emerson’s family wealth.

The front parlor contains a rare treasure, original English wallpaper from the mid 1700s.

The dreaded Stamp Tax on all paper goods was active during this time period, and the back of the wallpaper contains tax stamps.

They are amazingly well preserved, some of the only examples remaining in the United States.

The parlor also contains a cabinet holding an authentic Emerson artifact, a stuffed owl.

Emerson called it his favorite item; some of his friends thought it was creepy.





Upstairs contains the room where Nathaniel Hawthorne lived and worked.

The furniture and desk are copies, because the Concord Museum has the originals.

One of the window panes contains a note, scratched out by Hawthorne’s wife with her wedding ring.

The room next door contains a piano, which is original to the house.

A young Louisa May Alcott took lessons here from Emerson’s mother.

Old North Bridge

I finished my time in Concord at something I definitely remember from grade school, the Old North Bridge.

The current bridge is a reconstruction of the original, a low narrow wooden bridge over a slow moving river.

Like many other battlefields I saw on this trip (see Crossing the Rubicon), the current site looks incredibly peaceful and picturesque.





The battlefield contains a number of monuments.

The one directly across the bridge is iconic thanks to being reproduced everywhere, the Minuteman statue by Daniel Chester French.

One of his hands rests on a plow, and the other holds a rifle.

The name refers to being prepared to muster against the British on a moment’s notice.

On the other side of the bridge, almost hidden in the trees, is a rare monument to the losers of the Revolution memorializing the British soldiers who died at the bridge.

It was added in the late 1800s.





I wish I could say my journey ended with some grand defining gesture, like dipping my toe in the Atlantic Ocean.

In reality, my trip’s last destination was dinner at a mall food court near where I’m staying; the same exact same place I ate on my way to that Bed and Breakfast nine months ago.

I have returned to where I started, with hopefully a new perspective and lessons learned.

As for what comes next, that’s a blog for another time.

Thanks for reading my posts, and good luck on your own travels.

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Photos

Old North Bridge
Recreation of the site where the American Revolution started

Early artifacts
Artifacts from Concord's earliest inhabitants

Concord munitions
Sample of the supplies the British Army attempted to sieze at Concord, some from the actual events

The REAL midnight ride
Map of the midnight warning that the British were marching on Concord

Emerson's study
Recreation of Ralph Waldo Emerson's study. All artifacts were owned by him.

Hawthorne Desk
Desk (on the right) where Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter

Old North Church lantern
Many believe this was one of the two lanterns hung at Old North Church to warn the British were on the move

Old Manse
Ralph Waldo Emerson's house

Minuteman
Famous statue by Daniel Chester French, at Old North Bridge

British Monument
Monument to British soldiers killed at Old North Bridge