Concord Massachusetts

Old Manse Main Staircase, Concord, Massachusetts (2)

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The second floor hallway and staircase at the Old Manse in Concord, probably around 1890-1910. Image courtesy of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum, Frank Cousins Glass Plate Negatives Collection.

The scene in 2023:

These two photos were taken directly above the spot where the ones in a previous post were taken. The photos in the other post show the scene on the first floor, while these two photos show the stairway from the second floor, looing west. As discussed in more detail in other posts, this house was built in 1770 as the home of William and Phebe Emerson. The Emerson family was here when the Battle of Concord occurred in their backyard, and they witnessed the battle from the room on the right side of this hallway, in the northwest corner of the house. However, the house is perhaps best remembered for having briefly been the home of their grandson Ralph Waldo Emerson, and later as the home of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Ralph Waldo Emerson lived here for about a year from 1834 to 1835. At the time he was a young widower and former pastor who had abandoned the ministry after the death of his first wife. Although he spent a relatively short time here, this was a formative period in his life as he began to develop his Transcendentalist philosophy. His study was located in the same room where his grandparents had watched the battle, and it was there that he wrote his famous essay “Nature,” which had a strong influence on the subsequent Transcendentalist movement.

Emerson moved out of the house after his marriage to his second wife Lidian in 1835. His step grandfather Ezra Ripley, who had owned the house, died in 1841, and starting in 1842 Ezra’s son Samuel rented the house to another young aspiring writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne and his wife Sophia spent their wedding night here in the house in 1842, and they lived here for the next three years, with Hawthorne likewise using the same room as Emerson for his study. While living here, he wrote a number of short stories that were later published as a book, titled Mosses from and Old Manse.

The top photo was taken at some point around the turn of the 20th century by photographer Frank Cousins, who used his camera to document the interiors and exteriors of many historic New England homes. The house was still owned by descendants of the Ripley family, and it remained in the family until 1939, when Ezra and Phebe Ripley’s great granddaughter Sarah Ames died.

After Sarah Ames’s death, her husband donated the house and its contents to the Trustees of Reservations, which continues to operate the house as a museum. It remains well-preserved, and it is still furnished with the Ripley family’s belongings, including many of the items shown here in these photos. The furnishings are not all in the same spot as they were when the top photo was taken, but otherwise the only significant difference is the wallpaper. The current wallpaper, with its trompe l’oeil drapery, is based on the wallpaper that was in the hallway earlier in the 19th century, before the wallpaper in the top photo was installed.

Old Manse South Parlor, Concord, Massachusetts

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The south parlor at the Old Manse in Concord, probably around 1890-1910. Image courtesy of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum, Frank Cousins Glass Plate Negatives Collection.

The room in 2023:

These two photos show the south parlor at the Old Manse, a historic home that was built in 1770 as the home of the Reverend William Emerson and his wife Phebe Bliss Emerson. The house served as the parsonage, or “manse” for Emerson until his death in 1776, and it was subsequently the home of his successor, the Reverend Ezra Ripley, who married his widow Phebe in 1780.

However, the house is best remembered for its association with two prominent 19th century writers. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a grandson of William and Phebe, lived here from 1834 to 1835 and wrote one of his earliest works, the essay “Nature,” in his upstairs study here in the house. Then, from 1842 to 1845 the house was rented to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived here with his wife Sophia and their infant daughter Una.

The floor plan of the house is typical for late 18th century homes. It features a hallway and staircase in the center of the house, with parlors on either side of it on the ground floor. As was often the case, the north parlor was the more formal one, where its expensive furnishings would be better protected from sunlight, while the south parlor—shown here in these two photos—was a less formal space that would have been used by family members and close friends. This room has a door connecting it to the main hall, and it also has a door to the kitchen, as shown on the left side of these photos.

By the time the top photo was taken, the house was over a hundred years old and had become a famous landmark, thanks in part to the title of one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s early works, Mosses from an Old Manse, which he wrote while living in the house. It was still owned by descendants of the Ripley family, and many of its furnishings dated back to when Emerson and Hawthorne lived here.

Perhaps the most famous object in the top photo is the stuffed owl on the mantle. According to legend, the owl was brought to the house by Harvard students after they fled Cambridge at the start of the American Revolution. Regardless of how it ended up here, though, Hawthorne discovered it in the attic when he moved in. He brought it downstairs to the parlor and named it “Longfellow” after his Bowdoin College classmate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Hawthorne’s wife Sophia was somewhat less enamored with the owl, and the family left it here when they moved out in 1845. The owl is still here in this room today, although it is now in the corner behind where these two photos were taken from.

The house was owned by Ripley descendants until 1939, when Ezra and Phebe’s great granddaughter Sarah Ames died. Her husband then donated the house and its contents to the Trustees of Reservations, which has owned and preserved the house ever since. The room was decorated for Christmas when the second photo was taken, but otherwise it does not look much different from when the top photo was taken. The house remains an important literary and historic landmark, and it is open to the public for guided tours.

Old Manse Main Staircase, Concord, Massachusetts

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The main staircase at the Old Manse in Concord, probably around 1890-1910. Image courtesy of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum, Frank Cousins Glass Plate Negatives Collection.

The scene in 2023:

These two photos show the view looking up the main staircase from the front door at the Old Manse in Concord. This house, which was featured in more detail in an earlier post, was built in 1770 as the home of William and Phebe Emerson. William was the pastor of the church in Concord, but he died in 1776 while serving as a chaplain in the Continental Army. His widow Phebe subsequently remarried his successor, the Reverend Ezra Ripley, and the house would remain in their family well into the 20th century.

During this time, the house had several notable residents. William Emerson’s grandson was the prominent Transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he lived here for about a year from 1834 to 1835. He was not yet a famous author at this point, but he wrote one of his early works, the essay “Nature,” here in this house, in his study at the top of the stairs on the right side of the hall.

Ezra Ripley died in 1841, and his son Samuel inherited the house. However, he did not immediately move in, and instead rented the house to Nathaniel Hawthorne and his newlywed wife Sophia. They spent their wedding night here on July 9, 1842, and they lived here for the next three years. Like Emerson before him, Hawthorne was an aspiring yet largely unknown writer. He also used the same upstairs room for his study, and he wrote a number of short stories there, which would later be published in 1846 as the book Mosses from an Old Manse. However, Hawthorne struggled financially during this time and was unable to pay rent for the house, so he and his family ultimately moved out in 1845.

Another prominent resident here was Sarah Bradford Ripley, wife of Samuel Ripley. She and her husband moved into the house after the Hawthornes left in 1845, but Samuel died just two years later. Sarah was a self-taught scholar and educator, and after her husband’s death she earned an income by tutoring Harvard students here at the house.

Sarah Ripley died in 1867, but the house remained in her family for several more generations. The top photo was taken sometime around the turn of the 20th century, during the ownership of Sarah’s daughter Sophia Thayer. By this point the house was already a famous landmark, largely because of its association with Emerson and Hawthorne, and it had become known as the “Old Manse” because of the title of Hawthorne’s book that he wrote here.

In 1914, Sophia Thayer’s daughter Sarah Ames inherited the house. Sarah was the great granddaughter of Ezra and Phebe Ripley, making her the fourth consecutive generation to own the property. She died in 1939, and her husband subsequently donated the house, including all of its contents, to the Trustees of Reservations, a nonprofit conservation and historic preservation organization.

Today, the house still looks largely the same as it did when the Ripley family and their descendants lived here. The wallpaper here in the stairway hall has changed since the top photo was taken, in order to reflect the style of wallpaper that was here earlier in the 19th century. Otherwise, though, not much is different from the top photo, and even the sofa appears to be the same in both photos. The house is still owned by the Trustees, and it is open to the public for guided tours.

Meriam’s Corner, Concord, Mass

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The view looking northeast at Meriam’s Corner in Concord, with Old Bedford Road to the left and Lexington Road on the right, around 1900. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2020:

The battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775 marked the start of the American Revolution, when colonial militiamen resisted British attempts to seize military supplies in Concord. However, the fighting did not consist of a single battle, but rather a series of skirmishes spread out across several towns between Boston and Concord. It began at dawn in Lexington, when about 80 of the town’s militiamen gathered on the town common to confront the advancing British. A tense standoff led to both sides exchanging gunfire, killing eight colonists before the British continued their march to Concord. There, they seized some of the colonial supplies, but their advance was halted at Old North Bridge, where militiamen fired the famous “shot heard ’round the world” and forced three companies of redcoats to retreat.

Up until this point, the day was relatively bloodless for the British, who had one soldier wounded at Lexington, three killed at Old North Bridge, and nine wounded there. They had partially succeeded in their objectives, having destroyed some of the colonial cannons and supplies, but they now found themselves deep in hostile territory, with an ever-increasing number of militiamen streaming in from the surrounding towns. Facing a 17-mile march back to the safety of Boston, the redcoats ate lunch in Concord before leaving the town around noon.

Lt. Colonel Francis Smith, the commander of the British soldiers here, ordered a flank guard to protect the column of redcoats as they marched out of Concord. However, just beyond this intersection the road crosses a small stream, requiring the flank guard to return to the road in order to cross the bridge. At the same time, militiamen from Reading, Chelmsford, and Billerica arrived on scene. Observing that the British were vulnerable to attack without a flank guard, Captain John Brooks of the Reading minutemen ordered his soldiers to open fire, beginning what would soon turn into a long and bloody struggle for the British as they made their way back to Boston.

This intersection is known as Meriam’s Corner because it was the longtime home of the Meriam family, who had lived here since the mid-1600s. By 1775 there were three different houses here that belonged to members of the family, including the one on the left side of these photos. Built around 1705 by Joseph Meriam, it was subsequently owned by his son Nathan, who was living here with his wife Abigail and their children in 1775. Nathan was 54 years old at the time, and he was serving as one of the three town selectmen in Concord. He does not appear to have participated in the fighting here, but accounts of the battle suggest that his house and outbuildings were probably among the structures that the militiamen used for cover when they opened fire on the British column.

Contemporary descriptions of the day’s fighting lack specific details about how the fighting unfolded here at Meriam’s Corner, but several later accounts provide more information. Among these is a letter, written in 1825 by Reverend Edmund Foster, who had been one of the Reading minutemen who fought here a half century earlier. In this letter, he wrote the following, which is quoted from the National Park Service’s Historic Structure Report on the Meriam house:

We rendezvoused near the middle of the town of Bedford; left horses, and marched forward in pursuit of the enemy. A little before we came to Merriam’s hill, we discovered the enemy’s flank guard, of about 80 or 100 men, who, on their retreat from Concord, kept that height of land, the main body [being] in the road. The British troops and the Americans, at that time, were equally distant from Merriam’s corner. About twenty rods short of that place, the Americans made a halt. The British marched down the hill with very slow, but steady step, without music, or a word being spoken that could be heard. Silence reigned on both sides. As soon as the British had gained the main road, and passed a small bridge near that corner, they faced about suddenly, and fired a volley of musketry upon us. They overshot; and no one, to my knowledge, was injured by the fire. The fire was immediately returned by the Americans, and two British soldiers fell dead a little distance from each other, in the road near the brook. The battle now began, and was carried on with little or no military discipline and order, on the part of the Americans, during the remainder of that day. Each one sought his own place and opportunity to attack and annoy the enemy from behind trees, rocks, fences and buildings, as seemed most convenient.

As noted in the letter, the brief exchange of fire here at Meriam’s Corner was only the beginning of what would become an afternoon of guerilla warfare and ambushes on the part of the colonial militiamen. They inflicted particularly heavy casualties less than a mile to the east of here, at a spot now known as the Bloody Angle, where 30 British soldiers were killed or wounded. By the time the column reached Lexington the retreat had turned into a rout, and only the timely arrival of reinforcements from Boston saved the British from total disaster.

The British retreat marked the beginning of the Siege of Boston, which lasted until they evacuated the town 11 months later in March 1776. In the meantime, no further fighting occurred here in Concord for the rest of the war, and life in the town largely returned to normal. Nathan Meriam continued to live here in this house until his death in 1782. His son Ephraim subsequently acquired the property, and it would remain in his family until the death of his son Rufus in 1870. Rufus was a bachelor with no children, and the family sold the house a year later, ending two centuries of Meriam family ownership of this lot.

In 1871, the house was purchased by Thomas and Rose Burke, two Irish immigrants who lived here with their four children. He was a farmer, and he and Rose were still living here when the first photo was taken around 1900. According to that year’s census, all four of their children, who were now adults, were also still here, along with a hired hand who worked on the farm and lived with the family.

The first photo shows the scene looking northeast from the intersection. From here, the road on the left is Old Bedford Road, the route that the Reading minutemen took to get here. Out of view on the right is Lexington Road, which the British took on their way to and from Boston on the day of the battle. In the foreground on the right side of the scene is an inscribed boulder, which was installed in 1885 as part of the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of Concord’s founding. It reads: “Meriam’s Corner. The British troops retreating from the Old North Bridge were here attacked in flank by the men of Concord and neighboring towns and driven under a hot fire to Charlestown.”

Today, around 120 years after the first photo was taken, this scene has not changed substantially, except for the paved roads and increase in vegetation. The commemorative boulder is still there, as is the Meriam House in the distance, although it is now mostly hidden by trees from this angle. This site, along with much of the land surrounding the historic Battle Road, is now preserved and administered by the National Park Service as part of the Minute Man National Historical Park, which was established in 1959.

Melvin Memorial, Concord, Mass (2)

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The Melvin Memorial at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, around 1910-1920. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2020:

As explained in the previous post, the Melvin Memorial was created in honor of Concord natives Asa, John, and Samuel Melvin. These three brothers all died during the Civil War, and in 1897 their only surviving brother, James C. Melvin, commissioned prominent sculptor Daniel Chester French to design a memorial for them. It was dedicated here in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in 1909, and it features a relief sculpture titled Mourning Victory. The sculpture shows Victory draped in a flag and carrying a laurel sprig to symbolize the Union victory in the war, but it also shows Victory with downcast eyes, representing the loss of life that was required in order to win the war.

In more than a century since the first photo was taken, remarkably little has changed here in this scene. Sleepy Hollow Cemetery was designed as a natural, park-like cemetery that could be used by both the living and the dead, and it has retained that same appearance over the years. Even the tree in the center of the first photo appears to be the same one that is still standing here in the 2020 photo. As for the memorial itself, it underwent a major restoration from 2018 to 2019, including cleaning, repointing, and repairing the marble, along with replacing the tablets beneath the sculpture of Victory. As a result, the memorial now looks essentially the same as it did the first photo, and it stands as a significant work by one of the nation’s leading sculptors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Melvin Memorial, Concord, Mass

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The Melvin Memorial at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, around 1909-1912. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2020:

This monument in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery was dedicated in 1909 in honor of Asa, John, and Samuel Melvin, three brothers who died during the Civil War. All three were Concord natives, and they served in Company K of the First Massachusetts Heavy Artillery. Their deaths represented three of the leading causes of death in the war: disease, combat, and poor conditions prisoner of war camps. John died of dysentery in 1863, Asa was killed in battle during the siege of Petersburg in 1864, and Samuel died of disease and malnutrition in 1864 at the Andersonville prison in Georgia, following his capture after the Battle of Spotsylvania.

A fourth brother, James C. Melvin, was too young to join older siblings at the start of the war, but he enlisted later in the war once he was old enough. He was the only one to survive the war, and he went on to become a businessman in Boston, where he was involved in a cold storage company. One of his goals was to create a memorial in honor of his three older brothers, so in 1897 he commissioned prominent sculptor Daniel Chester French to design one.

Although a native of New Hampshire, French was no stranger to Concord. One of his first major works was The Minute Man, a bronze statue dedicated in 1875 at Old North Bridge, at the site of the Battle of Concord. That iconic symbol of the American Revolution has remained one of his most famous works, perhaps eclipsed only by one of his last works, the 30-foot marble statue of Abraham Lincoln inside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

For the Melvin Memorial, French drew little inspiration from existing Civil War monuments, which typically featured some variation of a uniformed soldier holding a rifle. Instead, he took inspiration from classical art, creating a relief sculpture that he titled Mourning Victory. The design features a seven-foot-tall figure of Victory emerging from the marble, draped in an American flag and carrying a laurel sprig. These symbols express patriotism and the triumphant victory of the Union during the war, but French also portrayed Victory with downcast eyes, mourning the human cost of that victory. Directly beneath the sculpture are tablets for each of the three brothers, with inscriptions identifying them and the circumstances of their deaths. The other inscription on the memorial, located below Victory, reads:

In memory of three brothers born in Concord who as private soldiers gave their lives in the war to save the country this memorial is placed here by their surviving brother, himself a private soldier in the same war.

“I with uncovered head
Salute the sacred dead
Who went and who return not”

The memorial was dedicated on June 16, 1909, in a ceremony that was well attended by surviving members of the First Massachusetts Heavy Artillery. The first photo was taken shortly after the dedication, and it shows the monument in its location in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. However, while it is in a cemetery, none of the brothers are actually buried here beneath the memorial. Only John’s body was returned home during the war, and he is buried elsewhere in the cemetery in the family plot, alongside his brother James, who died in 1915. As for the other two brothers, Samuel is buried in the Andersonville National Cemetery, while Asa lies in a mass grave in Petersburg.

Today, more than a century after the dedication of the Melvin Memorial, it still looks essentially the same as it did in the first photo, thanks to a restoration project that was completed in 2019. It is regarded as one of Daniel Chester French’s finest works, and a replica of it—which was also commissioned by James Melvin—is housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Overall, perhaps the only thing that has changed here in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery since the first photo was taken is the number of gravestones, which has obviously increased over the years. Appropriately enough, one of these stones is for Daniel Chester French himself, who died in 1931 and is buried up on the ridge behind the memorial.