QUESTIONS

1. Concord writer Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in which of the following houses? Select all that apply.
  1. The Old Manse
  2. The Hillside
  3. The Wayside
  4. The Samuel Whitney House
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Answer: Entry Tour Guide Level: A and C

Professional Tour Guide Level: All of them!

Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife Sophia Peabody moved to Concord on their wedding day in 1842. They rented Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ancestral home, The Old Manse, on Monument Street and stayed through 1845. The Hawthornes returned to Concord in 1852 when they bought “The Hillside” house from the Alcott family. Samuel Whitney, the muster master of Concord’s minutemen, occupied the home during the American Revolutionary War. The house, which the Hawthornes renamed “The Wayside”, is on Lexington Road next to the Louisa May Alcott Orchard House and is now owned by the National Park Service and open seasonally.

Read about the Hawthornes’ years at The Old Manse in Richard Smith’s article, “Our Eden,” on pg. 38.

2. This is a hot time for the housing real estate market. But if you were living in Victorian era Concord and about to buy a house from a family that suffered from chronic headaches, sore throats, and irritated eyes, what house feature might give you pause?
a)  The water supply
b)  Gas light
c)  Brightly colored wallpaper
d)  Solarium full of exotic plants
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Answer: C. Brightly colored wallpaper. The Victorians loved opulence and eye-catching brilliance. Brightly colored wallpapers could be made with paints containing arsenic. High levels of arsenic could off-gas from the wallpaper, filling houses with an “arsenic-cloud” that sickened, and in some cases killed, the residents.


3. A riddle based on Henry David Thoreau’s words from Walden: I am an iron horse; I make the hills echo with my snort like thunder; I shake the earth with my feet; I breathe fire and smoke from my nostrils. What am I?
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Answer: A steam train. The Boston-to-Fitchburg railroad arrived in Concord in 1844, traveling close to the cabin at Walden Pond that Henry David Thoreau lived in from 1845-47. If you are aboard the inbound train headed back to Boston from Concord, keep an eye out the left side windows and you’ll see Walden Pond a few moments after you leave the Concord Station.


4. Written in 1868, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was based on her family’s real life. In it, Louisa turns herself and her three sisters into the March sisters – what are their names?
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Answer: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy.

5. In Little Women, the youngest March sister has a fondness for what treat?
a)  Pineapples
b)  Raspberry cordial
c)  Huckleberry jam
d)  Pickled limes
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Answer: D. Pickled limes.

6. Concord has long been a pilgrimage site for history and literary enthusiasts. A Canadian author visited Concord in 1910 and toured The Old Manse, The Wayside, and Orchard House. Unlike Louisa May Alcott, whose best-known heroines were the four March sisters, the Canadian author’s most famous heroine was an orphaned only child with bosom friends and likes to drink raspberry cordial. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book The House of Seven Gables, the Canadian author’s character also lived in a house of gables. Who was the author and what was the title of the book(s)?
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Answer: Lucy Maude Montgomery, author of the Anne of Green Gables series. Montgomery wrote in her journal, “Concord is the only place I saw when I was away where I would like to live…. It is a most charming spot and I shall never forget the delightful drive we had around it. . . . It gave a strange reality to the books of [Hawthorne, Alcott and Emerson] which I have read to see those places where they once lived and labored.”


7. In Colonial era Concord, taverns were gathering places for meetings and socialization. Today, if you wanted to meet others in an 18th-century-esque tavern in Concord, you could go to:
a)  Hartwell Tavern
b)  Jones’s Tavern
c)  The Wright Tavern
d)  The Village Forge Tavern
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Answer: D. The Village Forge Tavern (located inside Concord’s Colonial Inn at 48 Monument Square). Jones’s Tavern and the Wright Tavern (Concord), and Hartwell Tavern (Lincoln) existed in the revolutionary era. Now gone, Jones’s tavern was near the Old South Burying Ground by Keyes Road. Although currently not open to the public, the Wright Tavern still stands on Main Street by Lexington Road. Hartwell Tavern is owned by the National Park Service and may be viewed along the Minuteman Trail walking path.

8. Boston publisher Robert Brothers issued Louisa May Alcott’s book Little Women in 1868. If the publishers wanted to promote the book and send one copy to every state in the Union in 1868, how many books would they need to send?
a)  13
b)  29
c)  37
d)  42
e)  50
f) No! I’m done with school and I’m not answering questions like this anymore.
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Answer: B. 37.

9. Walk into the woods of Concord and back into the 1600s Puritan era where the unknown and temptation dwelt in the wilds. Here you might find the spirits of women with the letter “A” sewn to their gowns. What did that letter signify?
a)  Able to do farm labor
b)  Adult of marrying age
c)  Adulteress 
d)  Awesome
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Answer: C. Adulteress. In 1694, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay in New England passed an act ordering people convicted of adultery to be whipped up to 40 times and to wear a 2” x 2” capital letter A “cut out in cloth of a contrary colour to their cloaths, and sewed upon their upper garments, on the outside of their arm, or on their back, in open view…”

To read a real-life story involving this, see Jaimee Joroff’s article “The Adulteress and the Airman”


10. Prior to writing books like Little Women, Louisa May Alcott wrote “blood and thunder” thriller tales full of romance and psychological twists. Louisa called them her “gorgeous fancies… [that could] interfere with the proper grayness of Old Concord.” Which of the below is/are not a Louisa May Alcott thriller title/s:
a)  Perilous Play
b)  Lost in A Pyramid, or the Mummy’s Curse
c)  Agatha’s Confession, or Thrice Tempted
d)  The Mysterious Key and What It Opened 
e)  Hester’s Vengeance, or Red Is Not Her Color 
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Answer: E. While not belonging to Louisa, “Hester’s Vengeance, or Red Is Not Her Color” could have been a title better suited to the Alcotts’ neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. You can visit both their homes on Lexington Road.


Contact Barrow Bookstore for a list of sources. Barrowbookstore@gmail.com.

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For more than 50 years, Barrow Bookstore has been a favorite of residents and visitors alike, specializing in Concord authors and history, children’s books and literature. The shop also provides a wide array of gently read and rare titles ranging from paperbacks to first editions and original manuscripts. Staff members have all worked as tour guides and reenactors in Concord and are happy to share their knowledge about the town and its history. Discover more at barrowbookstore.com.