Photographers

Colonial Inn, Concord, Massachusetts (3)

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The Colonial Inn at Monument Square in Concord, on October 15, 1929. Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leon Abdalian Collection.

The scene in 2023:

These two photos show a view of the Colonial Inn that is very similar to the previous post. It is taken just a little farther to the east, near the center of Monument Square, and the top photo was taken about a decade or two after the old photo in the previous post.

As explained in more detail in a post from several years ago, the Colonial Inn is a combination of several different historic buildings that were constructed during the 18th and early 19th centuries. The oldest section is on the far right side, and was built around 1717. The section in the middle was built later in the 1700s as a one-story structure, but was later expanded with a second story around 1800. Then, the section on the left side was constructed sometime around 1812-1820.

The three different sections sat on different parcels, and they had different ownership histories, but they were eventually all acquired by John Maynard Keyes in 1897. He opened the Colonial Inn here, and it has remained in operation as a hotel ever since. The top photo was taken by photographer Leon Abdalian on October 15, 1929, showing the scene outside the building just two weeks before the stock market crash triggered the start of the Great Depression. In nearly a century since then, not much has changed in this view of the building, although the hotel was significantly expanded in 1960 with an addition in the back that is partially visible on the far left side of the bottom photo.

Colonial Inn, Concord, Massachusetts (2)

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The Colonial Inn at Monument Square in Concord, around 1910-1920. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2023:

As explained in more detail in an earlier post, the Colonial Inn is a historic hotel that stands at the northern end of Monument Square in the center of Concord. It was built over the span of many years, with the earliest section in the distance on the far right side of the scene. It was built around 1716, and was originally owned by James Minot Jr. , and subsequent owners included Dr. Timothy Minot, Ammi White, and John Thoreau, the grandfather of Transcendentalist author Henry David Thoreau. Henry himself also lived here for a few years as a teenager, from 1835 to 1837.

The central section of the hotel, which has the row of five windows behind the “Colonial Inn” sign in the bottom photo, was built later in the 18th century, but was originally only one story in height. It was used as a store, and it was one of the places in Concord where colonists stored munitions in advance of the Battle of Concord on April 19, 1775. This section of the property was sold to John White in 1789, and second story was added around 1800.

The section of the building on the left side was constructed around 1812-1820 as the home of John White, who later sold the left and central sections to Daniel Shattuck in 1821. Shattuck then purchased the section on the right side from the Thoreau family in 1839, putting all three buildings under the same ownership for the first time. He lived here until his death in 1867, but shortly before he died he gave the entire property to his daughter, Frances Surette. It was apparently in the 1860s, probably during her ownership, that the section on the right was altered with a Mansard roof. Frances’s husband, Louis Surette, was a dry goods merchant, and they also operated a boarding house here, which they named the Thoreau House.

In 1889, the central and right-hand sections were sold to John Maynard Keyes, who opened a hotel here. He later acquired the section on the left in 1897, and named the hotel the Colonial Inn. The top photo was taken soon after, probably sometime in the 1910s, and it shows the building from the southwest, at the corner of Monument Square and Lowell Road.

More than a century later, the building has undergone additional changes. Most significantly, this has included the addition of a large wing on the back of the hotel, which was added in 1960. Otherwise, though, the historic portion of the building remains much the same as it did in the early 20th century, and it remains in use as a hotel while also standing as an important historic landmark in downtown Concord.

Ralph Waldo Emerson House, Concord, Massachusetts

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The house at 28 Cambridge Turnpike, near the corner of Lexington Road in Concord, around 1900-1906. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The house on April 19, 2025:

 

 

This house was built in 1828 by John T. Coolidge for his son, Charles Coolidge. However, it is most famous for having been the longtime home of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who purchased the house from the Coolidge family in 1835. He was in his early 30s at the time, and he lived here for the rest of his life, until his death in 1882.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803, but he had Concord roots. His grandfather, William Emerson, had been the pastor of the church in Concord, and lived in the Old Manse until his death in 1776 while serving in the Continental Army. William’s eldest son, William, also became a pastor, serving at the First Church in Boston, and William Emerson Jr.’s son, Ralph Waldo Emerson, likewise continued the family legacy and entered the ministry. He was ordained as pastor of the Second Church in Boston, but he began to struggle with doubts about his faith, especially after his wife Ellen’s death in 1831. He resigned his position at the church a year later, and then spent the next year overseas in Europe.

In 1834, Emerson moved to Concord, where he lived with his grandmother’s second husband Ezra Ripley at the Old Manse. It was there that he wrote some of his early works, including his philosophical essay “Nature,” which laid out many of the tenets of Transcendentalism. Then, in 1835 he married his second wife Lidian and purchased this property as their home. The house had previously been known as “Coolidge Castle” but Emerson renamed it “Bush.”

Over the next few decades, Emerson rose in prominence as one of the leading American philosophers. He was known for his lectures and essays, the most famous of which included “The American Scholar” and “Self-Reliance.” He influenced many other figures in the Transcendentalist movement, including most notably fellow Concord resident Henry David Thoreau. Lidian was also involved in Transcendentalism, particularly on the more practical political and social side of the movement. Among other causes, she was active in reform movements such as abolitionism, women’s rights, and the humane treatment of animals.

From 1841 to 1843, Henry David Thoreau lived here with the Emersons. He was in his mid-20s, about 15 years younger than the Emersons, but he formed a close friendship with both Ralph Waldo and Lidian. This relationship, particularly between Thoreau and Lidian, has led to recent speculation about whether this was a strictly platonic friendship, or whether Thoreau—a lifelong bachelor with no known romantic partners—harbored romantic feelings for Lidian. Either way, the Emersons had a significant influence on Thoreau’s beliefs and writings. A few years after he moved out of the house, he began his famous two-year-long stay in a cabin at Walden Pond, which he built on land that was owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau stayed at the cabin until September 1847, and he then returned to the Emerson house, where he lived until 1848.

The Emersons lived here for the rest of their lives, and they had four children here, three of whom lived to adulthood. Probably the most significant change to the house during their ownership came in July 1872, when a fire started in the attic. It burned the roof, along with much of the second floor, but the rest of the house was saved and it was soon rebuilt. Ralph Waldo Emerson died in 1882 at the age of 78, and Lidian died 10 years later at the age of 90.

The top photo was taken around the turn of the 20th century, when their oldest surviving child Ellen was still living here. She died in 1909, and her siblings subsequently inherited the house. Today, the house is still owned by descendants of the Emerson family, with few changes since the top photo was taken more than a century ago. It is preserved as a museum, and it is seasonally open to the public for tours.

Reuben Brown House, Concord, Massachusetts

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The house at 77 Lexington Road in Concord, around 1908. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The house in 2023:

As explained in more detail in the previous post, this house was built sometime around the 1720s. It was originally much smaller, but it was expanded sometime around the 1780s by Reuben Brown, a saddler who lived here with his wife Polly and their eight children. Brown had his shop in the building next door at 69 Lexington Road, which was later converted into a house. He lived here until his death in 1832, and the house was later owned by his son Reuben Brown Jr. and then by George and Julia Clark. Julia ultimately sold the house to the Concord Antiquarian Society in 1886, and it was converted into a museum.

The top photo was taken around 1908, when the house was still owned by the Concord Antiquarian Society. However, the organization, which was later renamed the Concord Museum, moved to its current facility just a little to the east of here in 1930, and this house subsequently became a restaurant and an inn, before being converted back to a single-family residence in 1955. It is still standing here today, with only minor changes, including alterations to the ell on the right side, triple windows beneath the gables on the third floor, and the removal of the historically-inaccurate shutters that were on the house in the top photo.

Richard Manning House, Salem, Massachusetts

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The view looking north on Herbert Street in Salem, around 1890-1910, with the Richard Manning House at 10 1/2 Herbert Street in the center of the scene. 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 scene on Herbert Street, a narrow side street that extends northward from Derby Street in the historic seaport area of Salem. Both photos show a number of historic late 18th and early 19th century buildings, but the most significant one is the three-story house in the center of both photos. It was built around 1790 as the home of Richard and Miriam Manning, the maternal grandparents of author Nathaniel Hawthorne, and it was Hawthorne’s home for much of his childhood and early adulthood.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem on July 4, 1804, in a house that once stood nearby on Union Street, which is the next street over on the left side of this scene. He lived there with his family until 1808, when his father Nathaniel—a merchant ship captain—died of yellow fever in Suriname. The young Nathaniel, his two siblings, and their mother Elizabeth then moved into this house with Elizabeth’s parents. He went on to spend much of his childhood here, and then later lived here as a young adult, after graduating from Bowdoin College in 1825.

It was here that Hawthorne wrote some of his earliest works, including many of the stories that were later published in Twice-Told Tales and The Snow-Image. He lived in a room on the third floor, and in 1840 he reflected upon this room, writing:

Here I sit, in my old, accustomed chamber where I used to sit in days gone by. Thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character  were formed, and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat for a long, long time waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all—at least until I were in my grave. And sometimes it seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy, at least as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of being. By and by, the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth,—not, indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice—and forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought preferable to my old solitude till now. And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and have been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounter with the multitude. But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart.

This passage characterizes the love-hate relationship that Hawthorne seemed to have with not just his childhood home, but also Salem in general. After his marriage to Sophia Peabody in 1842, the couple lived at the Old Manse in Concord until 1845, when they returned to Salem. Hawthorne was appointed as Surveyor of the Port of Salem in 1846, which he obtained largely because of his friendship with fellow Bowdoin College classmate and future U.S. President Franklin Pierce. For the next three years he worked at the Custom House on Derby Street, and he and Sophia lived in several different houses during that period, including one at 18 Chestnut Street and another one at 14 Mall Street.

However, he was dismissed from his position at the Custom House after the Whig Party took control of the White House in 1849, and he subsequently channeled many of his frustrations into an essay called “The Custom-House,” in which he criticized the Custom House in particular but also Salem as a whole. It became the introduction to Hawthorne’s most famous work, The Scarlet Letter, which he wrote at his Mall Street house in 1849 and early 1850. He would leave Salem for good after this, and lived in Lenox for a time before returning to Concord, where he and Sophia lived with their children at The Wayside until his death in 1864.

In the meantime, his childhood home in Salem was still owned by the Manning family as late as the 1850s, but it subsequently saw a number of different owners throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of these owners appear to have used it as a rental property for immigrant families. In 1900, for example, it was the home of Eva Morel, a 31-year-old French-Canadian immigrant who lived here with her three young children.

The top photo was taken around this time, probably sometime between 1890 and 1910. It shows Hawthorne’s childhood home in the center of the scene, surrounded by other 18th and 19th century houses. The house just beyond it, at 10 Herbert Street, was built in 1874, and the one across the street in the foreground on the right side, at 11 Herbert Street, was built around 1840.

Today, more than a century after the top photo was taken, much of this scene is still recognizable. The house on the far left was replaced by the present-day house in 1912, the yard in the foreground is now a parking lot, and Hawthorne’s house has seen some alterations, including the removal of the large central chimney. However, most of the houses from the top photo are still standing. And, quite remarkably, the large tree in the foreground is also still here. Depending on its exact age, it is quite plausible that this tree might have been a young sapling when Hawthorne was living across the street.

Chestnut Street from Summer Street, Salem, Massachusetts

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The view looking west on Chestnut Street from the corner of Summer Street in Salem, 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 west on Chestnut Street from the east end of the street, at Summer Street. As described in previous posts, the street was developed in the early 19th century as an upscale residential neighborhood. At the time, Salem was a major seaport, and Chestnut Street became home to many of Salem’s merchants and sea captains. Most of the houses feature Federal-style architecture, although there are also some examples of later 19th century styles, including the Italianate home on the right side, which was built in 1853.

The top photo was taken around the turn of the 20th century by Frank Cousins, who documented many of the historic homes and streetscapes in Salem. Since then, very little has changed aside from the paved street and the parked cars. Overall, the street is one of the best-preserved examples of a Federal-style neighborhood in New England, and it is part of the Chestnut Street District, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.