Transcendent Town
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

My grandmother took me to Concord, Mass., when I was 10 years old, but I was obsessed with the card game Authors and spent the trip playing indoors. Ten years later, I studied at Harvard for a summer, obsessed, this time, with Henry David Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists. Every weekend, I took solitary sojourns to Concord, 20 miles northwest of Boston, packing my beat-up copy of “Walden,” plenty of gorp (good old raisins and peanuts), and my journal. Since I’d heard that Thoreau’s father made pencils, I would “saunter” – as Thoreau’s essay “Walking” suggested – around Walden Pond scanning the ground, sure that I would stumble on a historic writing implement here.
I went to Concord again a few weeks ago for a Transcendental weekend away from the city. This is a good year to visit the birthplace of the American Revolution: Concord will commemorate the sesquicentennial of its Sleepy Hollow Cemetery – where Emerson, Thoreau, the Alcotts, and Nathaniel Hawthorne have family plots – on October 2. Sponsored by Friends of Sleepy Hollow, the ceremony will feature a tree planting, plaque placement, and reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1855 consecration speech.
At Concord’s Hawthorne Inn (462 Lexington Road, 978-369-5610, $110-$305), owner Gregory Burch greeted me and showed me to the Musketaquid Room, named for the Indian word for the Concord River, the “river of meadows.” Mr. Burch came in with an antique tin tray of crispy homemade pizzelles, snowflake-patterned Italian cookies made with a miniature waffle iron.
“In Concord, you find that there’s history everywhere,” Mr. Burch said as I sipped my tea. In fact, the town is so tightly packed it’s possible to tour several generations of literary and political history on foot. The inn itself was built in 1870 as a private home, and the land was, at various times, owned by Emerson, the Alcotts, and Hawthorne. It was surveyed by Thoreau twice. Bronson Alcott built a work of “Sylvan architecture” there, gathering roots and natural objects and diverting the Millbrook stream in a semicircular arch to create a pool of cool water. The result was part bathhouse, part tool shed, and part meditation spot. Mr. Burch and his wife bought the property in 1976.
The Wayside (455 Lexington Road, 978-318-7836, $4), across the street, has been the home of Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and children’s writer Margaret Sidney. A mulberry tree in the front yard had been grafted to be half white and half red. Local rumor has it that Hawthorne planted it himself in honor his two daughters, Una and Rose.
Less than 50 yards east, there’s a white Colonial cottage with a picket fence and a stone marker reading “EMPRIAM WALES BULL planted seeds of a wild lambrusco grape found on this hillside which after three generations of his work and wisdom became in this garden in September 1853 the Concord Grape.” Bull never profited from his discovery and died penniless; his curmudgeonly tombstone reads, “He sowed, others reaped.” If you’re hungry, you can buy some bunches of grapes in front of the Concord Visitor Center in his honor.
The Battle Road, the path that the colonial farmer minutemen followed on April 19, 1775, shortly after the musket shot that began the American Revolution was fired, makes a wonderful walk before breakfast. Its trail begins near Bull’s grapevine cottage. The five-mile ramble through Minute Man National Historical Park begins at a little wooden bridge across the street from Columbo Farm near the corner of Lexington and Old Bedford Roads. The path winds past a misty open field, a cornfield, and stacks of boxed beehives.
Downtown Concord offers its own pleasures. At the Cheese Shop (29 Walden St., 978-369-5778) I bought a picnic lunch of baguette, country pate, brie, and green apples. At the Concord Free Library (129 Main St., 978-318-3300), librarian Constance Manoli-Skocay showed me the original manuscript of Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” the library special collection’s prized possession. The pages are in plastic sheet protectors in a bound notebook. A high school English teacher had once told me that Thoreau had the worst handwriting in the history of American literature, but in fact it is mostly wavy but legible. It goes on like this for several pages, then abruptly changes for a page or two to absolutely perfect penmanship.
You may want to bring along a copy of Emerson’s poem “The Concord Hymn” to read as you walk along the newly renovated Old North Bridge, the site of the “shot heard ’round the world.” The Minute Man statue by Daniel Webster French – who also did the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial – was the one thing I remembered, besides playing cards, from my childhood trip.
It’s at the nearby Orchard House (399 Lexington Road, 978-369-4118, $8) where Louisa May Alcott, whose books have sold more copies than any Concord author, wrote “Little Women” at 36. And at the Old Manse, built for Emerson’s grandfather William Emerson, Hawthorne wrote “Mosses of an Old Manse” and Emerson wrote “Nature” (269 Monument St., 978-369-3909). (An ancestor of Emerson’s was a founder of Concord in 1635, and his grandfather William was the parish minister when the Revolution broke out.) Emerson’s own house (28 Cambridge Turnpike, 978-369-2236, $6), a square white Colonial, stands as it did when he died in 1882 at the age of 79.
His study is restored in the Concord Museum, across the street (Cambridge Turnpike at Lexington Road, 978-369-9763, $8). Along with the museum’s expected collection of local historical artifacts – a walking stick, a flute, a brass spyglass – there is a blue pencil box. It reads, “J.T. & Co invite artists and connoisseurs who are particular in their choice of a pencil to compare theirs the others in the market feeling confidant they will be found to be equal to any whether of domestic or foreign manufacture in all the dualities that constitute a good pencil. John Thoreau and Company. Concord, Mass.”
There they were, what I’d been looking for that summer 16 years ago at Walden Pond – seven pencils, one flat, three fat and round with thick leads, and three standard size.
I found my Thoreau pencil; now, to find Thoreau. Bedford Road runs to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (east of Concord Center on Rt. 62, 978-318-3233), where, at the far back end, is Author’s Ridge. A simple stone reading “Hawthorne” marks the burial spot where Nathaniel and his daughter Rose are buried. The Alcott and Emerson graves are clearly marked a few steps away. At the Thoreau family plot, a headstone that reads “Henry” had a miniature cairn on top of it and some flowers and pinecones.
Thoreau died of tuberculosis at 45, earlier than any of his Transcendentalist peers. Though he had improved upon methods at his father’s pencil factory by blending the amount of clay and graphite to create pencils of varying softness, by his mid-20s he had tired of his father’s business. He went to live on his mentor Emerson’s woodlot on Walden’s north shore, as he famously wrote, “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
From the top of the ridge at the unmarked Wyman Road, I saw the pond. “Walden is blue at one time and green at another,” Thoreau wrote, “even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both blues.” The path leads to Throreau’s Cove on the pond’s north end. The original site of the cabin he built is just above this cove. It cost him $28.125, and lasted two years, two months, and two days.
In his “American Notebooks,” Hawthorne called Thoreau “a singular character – a young man with much wild original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own.” The same could easily be said of Concord.