On the morning of April 19, 1775, over 700 King’s troops marched into Concord to search for military supplies that spies had told Royal Governor Gage were being hidden there to support a rebellion against the King. Their search met unexpected resistance, exploding into a day-long battle over eighteen miles from Concord to Boston with fighting on open ground and from behind trees and stone walls. Today, you can retrace the soldiers’ steps along the Battle Road and imagine the landscape and walls as they were that day thanks, in part, to a 2024 project by Minute Man National Historical Park to rebuild the park’s historic stone walls in Concord, Lincoln, and Lexington. Led by Michael Papile, a team of professional stone wallers affiliated with The Stone Trust (an organization dedicated to preserving and advancing the art of dry stone walling) restored these walls. Stone by stone, stories of time were put back together.
As the 250th Anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord approaches, a witness house sits at the top of Concord’s Main Street, full of stories of rebels and traitors whose actions shaped the America we know today. It is the Wright Tavern, a red wood building with black shutters; one of the last standing colonial-era taverns from that fateful day of April 19, 1775.
The tale of this tavern begins with a dangerous hole in the ground.
They say a person’s home is their castle.
But what do you do if that castle is stolen from you?
In May of 2024, such a theft reportedly occurred in Concord, Massachusetts, when an unknown entity badly, but effectively, stole the identity of a Concord landowner and sold her land out from under her. Located on the corner of Mattison Drive and Ayrshire Lane (near Alford Circle), the sloping 1.8-acre plot of land had been purchased for the woman (who we shall call “the True Concord Lady”) in 1991 before circumstances moved her out of state.
Like the greased loops on a hangman’s dropped noose, the lives of Concord writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott are forever tightly bound together by a tale of witchcraft that began as follows:
Welcome, dear readers, to the story of The Barrow Bookstore, a unique shop featuring rare and gently-read books down the lane at 79 Main Street, Concord, Massachusetts. For 54 years, the Barrow has been owned by three generations of women whose passion for history and literature personify Louisa May Alcott’s quote, “She is too fond of books and it has turned her brain.”
