Concord in the Mid to Late 19th Century
Home of Transcendentalist Writers, but also my Great-Great Grandfather
“At the end of [the Milldam Street’s] short length, Walden Street branches abruptly to the left. Speedily quitting the clustered buildings of the town, this street leads across a mile of Concord’s level meadows until it begins to climb a wooded slope. […] In the woods to the left lies ‘Fairyland’ with its pond, beloved in Concord for its natural beauty and its earliest skating.”1
Sometimes the best entry points into history are the places it touches you personally. My great-great grandfather grew up in Concord. Perhaps it was being in a town surrounded by famous writers, but he certainly knew how to spin a yarn. For example, he claimed that he was Tommy is Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men. Is this true? Maybe. But probably unlikely. He was only about 5 or so when the book was published.
Regardless, it often gets me thinking what it would have been like to live in Concord in that time period.
Today, Walden Street, where my great-great grandfather grew up, is quite near the center of town. There’s a Caffe Nero at the corner of Walden Street and Main Street. The street is so named because the road goes straight to Walden Pond. Maps from the late 19th century show quite a few buildings close to the town center, but very few along Walden Street when you get further away - and closer to the pond. (If you’re curious, the town of Concord has a website with a bunch of historic maps linked here.)
Walden Street also runs almost, but not quite, parallel to Lexington Road. The two roads run parallel until Walden Street runs out of houses (in the 19th century), then Walden Street turns south. Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott lived from 1857 to 1877, is on Lexington Road, not far from the center of town.2
Besides Louisa May Alcott, other notable authors also lived in Concord in the mid-19th century. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a constant presence in the town until his death in 1882. In 1852, Nathaniel Hawthorne, often associated with Salem, moved to the Wayside, a previous residence of the Alcotts. He had previously spent time living in the Emerson family home, also known as Old Manse. In 1864, however, Nathaniel Hawthorne died in his sleep. My great-great grandfather was not born until the next year. Similarly, Henry Thoreau died in 1862. The bulk of the great authors living in Concord seem to have been around the 1850s - before my great-great grandfather would have had much of a chance to get to know them. My great-great grandfather was only about 12 years old by the time the Alcotts were no longer in residence at the Orchard House. By 1888, when he was twenty-three, he was married, and soon after, he moved out of Concord. The fact is, the bulk of the transcendentalist movement history in Concord was just before the Civil War, and the documentation that overlaps with my family seems to be limited. Historians of Concord like to focus on pre-Civil War, rather than post.
In trying to do some further digging, I stumbled across a little book that was published in 1915 entitled Old Concord. It is not particularly well footnoted - as in, it isn’t footnoted, at all. But it does go over the general gist of the events of both the Battles of Lexington and Concord, as well as the authors and other famous names coming and going from the town in the 19th century. For example: “Coming to Concord in 1855, at the request of Emerson and several other citizens who desired a superior school for their children, [Frank B. Sanborn] taught here for eight years, and has resided here for most of the remaining time. He was a leader in the joyous dramatics in which the Alcott sisters and his own scholars took such a happy part.”3
I did find this description of the transcendentalist visitors within the pages of Old Concord: “Naturally the town looked askance at the strangers who came to visit these men. Some of the visitors were certainly famous, and were inoffensive enough. But others were mighty queer. Those men with long hair, and women with short, and cranks with schemes to make the world over, or with diets, or methods of dress— Why, they swarmed like bees around Mr. Emerson’s door, and the poor man could hardly get rid of them. Transcendentalists they called themselves—and no one could give a satisfactory meaning to the word!”4
I’ve put a link to this book in the footnotes.
Overall, while I didn’t quite find the satisfactory answer I was looking for, this was still a fun little rabbit hole to dig down in to. I suppose I will have to re-read Little Men to see if I can get a better picture. At the very least, perhaps finding the little bits about Tommy might give me some insight into my own family.
“If in America there is anything that speaks simply and feelingly of the older times, it is a New England town. Concord,—dignified, picturesque, homelike, and still vital,—isnotable among its kind.”5
On a side note, while not directly related to the late 19th century, there was this account that I found when searching for blacksmiths in Concord. A transcription of a 73 year old man recounting living in Concord: link. There’s a lot of information missing, but it does indicate the location of two blacksmiths shops, one on Grant Street and one on Sudbury Road. My 3rd great-grandfather briefly worked as a blacksmith before working for a custom house. So, it would seem that maybe - if those blacksmith shops were there - that one of those two locations may have employed him. It is difficult to say for sure. It was also fun to read for the description of the mail being kicked off the train going through Concord.
Allen French and Illus. Lester G. Hornby, Old Concord (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1915), 84. (Digitized by the Library of Congress)
Orchard House website: https://louisamayalcott.org/about
French, 151-52.
French, 11-12.
French, 156.