Concord

Not Orchard House, but The Wayside,
The Alcotts lived here briefly and
Nathaniel Hawthorne added the turret as his study.

As an early devotee of Little Women, the visit to Concord and especially Orchard House where the Alcotts lived was a great highlight. I got to see the half-circle desk at which Louisa wrote the novel and rescued her family from genteel poverty. It was very interesting to hear about the Alcotts and the transcendentalist movement; they were great friends of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who lent Louisa's father some money to buy the house. Louisa's grave is in the Alcott plot in Sleepy Hollow cemetery on Writers' Ridge, not far from the Thoreau, Hawthorne and Emerson plots. Louisa went to nurse in the Civil War, contracted pneumonia there and recovered, but was poisoned by the cure, which contained mercury. A tomboyish, athletic woman before this, Louisa was sick for the 25 years till her death.

The Old Manse, where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne lived at different times.

The place was awash with eighteenth century houses and buildings related to the revolutionary war. Of course, the Old North Bridge was where the first shots of the war rang out after Paul Revere's night ride to warn the leaders of the rebellion - a ride he didn't finish as he was arrested before he got there. Another man brought word.

The very peaceful Old North Bridge

Side view of where John Jack lived and worked

We saw the house that a slave from Africa, John Jack, worked in and earned his freedom. His gravestone had this epitaph:

God wills us free.man wills us slaves.
I will as God wills Gods will be done
Here lies the body of
John Jack,
A native of Africa who died
March 1773, aged about sixty years
Tho' born in a land of slavery,
He was born free.
Tho' he lived in a land of liberty,
He lived a slave,
Till by his honest tho' stolen labors
He acquired the source of slavery
Which gave him his freedom;
Tho' not long before,
Death the grand tyrant
Gave him his final emancipation,
and set him on a footing with kings
Tho' a slave to vice,
He practiced those virtues
Without which kings are but slaves.