We spent Monday afternoon exploring the neighborhood while
our friend Erica did some errands, and in this case it meant the Minute Man
National Historical Park, site of the battle that began the War for Independence
and Thoreau’s Walden Pond. We began, of course, with the obelisk, the North
Bridge and the overlook onto the battlefield. In this case that meant the
Concord commons and what interested me was the limited scope of the battle.
This was 2,500 British regulars detailed from Boston to seize rebel munitions
and a roughly equal number of local militia men come out to defend their homes
and families. So the result is that you can envision the battle taking place in
a discrete space in a way that you cannot when larger armies maneuvered around
one another over larger expanses. And, of course, this is hallowed ground.
Where the experiment in self-government began to be realized.
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| The old North Bridge, standing there I could imagine the British troops, most of them mere boys, ranged facing the massed militias or Concord and the surrounding countryside |
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| A small monument to the fallen Brits |
Of greater interest to Sharon, was the house next door,
which is known to us as The Old Manse, built next door just a few years before
the battle by The Reverand William Emerson, grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson
and the center of American literary history for another century. Sadly, as so
often the case on this trip, it was not yet open for the season, se we were not
able to get the full story.
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| The boathouse |
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| The Manse |
From there a quick stroll through Concord and we headed off
to Walden Pond where that great curmudgeon and gadfly Henry David Thoreau went
off into the woods, as one young girl we overheard on the trail put it, “to do
whatever the f*ck he wanted.”
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| Rosa comes to call on Mr. Thoreau |
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