Ellen Tucker Emerson was the second child and eldest daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lidian Jackson Emerson. Born on February 25, 1839, she was named after Emerson’s first wife, Ellen Tucker, who was deceased.
Emerson understood the importance of education for all and ensured that Ellen was well schooled by educators, including Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, wife of biologist Louis Agassiz and a dedicated teacher who became the first president of Radcliffe College; Franklin Sanborn, Concord educator and one of abolitionist John Brown’s “secret six;” and Elizabeth Sedgwick, who founded the Sedgwick School for Young Ladies in Lenox to enable girls to expand their knowledge. By the time Ellen’s formal schooling ended in 1858, she was able to speak and translate French and German, capabilities she was able to draw on for the rest of her life.
Concord has a reputation for producing people of radical ideas, justice, and bravery. From the minutemen of the American Revolution to transcendentalist writers like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the town of Concord has an ability to grow a sense of social justice in all its citizens. The story of Ellen Garrison Jackson Clark, an African American woman born and raised here in Concord who went on to fight for freedom at a national level, is a less well-known example—an injustice that The Robbins House and the Concord Museum are seeking to rectify.
The focal point of Concord’s historic Monument Square is the Civil War Monument. A bronze plaque on the obelisk honors the names of 48 local men who lost their lives in the Civil War; however, 49 Concord men paid the ultimate price. Private George Washington Dugan’s name is missing.
Concord usually gets attention for its past. Even Louisa May Alcott worried that her town was “degenerating into a museum of revolutionary relics.” She, of course, belonged to an intellectual event that gave a second chapter to Concord’s celebrated history, but the Concordian of today is liable to feel that everything great belongs to the past.
In 1976, Concordians and school administrators Barbara Elliot and Janet Jones published the text Concord: Its Black History, 1636-1860 through the Concord Public Schools. The text included photos of Black and White children visiting places associated with 19th century [and earlier] Black residents.
It was cold outside, but the glowing fire in the brick oven warmed the kitchen as Elizabeth busied herself baking the week’s bread for her enslavers, Col. John Ashley and his wife Hannah. Her younger sister Lizzie, also enslaved in the Ashley household, was too frail for heavy labor, so she watched as Elizabeth stirred the fire with an iron shovel. A
To visit The Old Manse – an elegant, thirteen-room colonial built on the banks of the Concord River in 1770 – is to experience pivotal moments in our nation’s history.
The Umbrella Arts Center has set the stage for a bold season of artistic and cultural programs exploring the experience of being Black in America, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
It remains a moral, political, and economic necessity to understand America’s underground railroad’s origin and legacy.1 The Wayside in Concord, Massachusetts provides us with an inside view into this history. The Wayside is part of the National Park Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program. The NPS program “commemorates and preserves the historical significance of the Underground Railroad which sought to address the injustices of slavery and make freedom a reality in the United States and is a crucial element in the evolution of our national civil rights movement. Inhabitants of The Wayside house have witnessed a dramatic spectrum of American history including the ongoing struggle for freedom and equality.”2
In her pioneering book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), writer and thinker Margaret Fuller articulated the goal of women’s progress in America: “We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man.” Spoken seventy-five years before women had the legal right to vote, Fuller’s words served as a rallying cry for generations of people who fought to live and work as they pleased.
