Featured Stories

It’s Fall - time to venture out and explore the places, people, and stories that make this region so special. Begin by planning a day out with our special insert, “An Apple Picking Road Trip.” Our second special guide invites you to spend a day exploring West Concord. Discover the fascinating lives Henry David Thoreau lived after leaving Walden Pond and encounter a possible Hawthorne family curse, a forgotten Yankee hero, and Ruth Robinson Wheeler. And of course, concerts, exhibitions, festivals, walks, talks, and family activities await you throughout the season. Turn to “Things to See & Do this Fall” and “Arts Around Town” for all the details. Happy fall.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.

On September 6, 1847, Henry David Thoreau left his one-room house at Walden Pond and returned to Concord. Living at Walden for over two years had been a life-changing experience for the thirty-year-old Thoreau. Wanting to be a writer, he went to the pond to write, and while there he did exactly that. He produced two drafts of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. He wrote one lecture about Thomas Carlyle and another about living at the pond called “A History of Myself.” He also penned an essay titled “Ktaadn” about going to Maine in the summer of 1846. And he wrote in his journal almost daily. But what would he do once he was back in Concord?

Autumn is filled with amazing things to do this year! Here are 19 of them that you won't want to miss.

So revered is the Baldwin apple that Massachusetts has not one but two monuments to the bright-red winter fruit.

For many years, the Baldwin apple was the most popular fruit in New England and New York. A small, hard apple remarkably free of blight and blemishes, people prized it for making hard cider and pie. Commercial growers loved it because it produced huge crops every other year and shipped easily.

In 1885, an article in the New England Farmer praised the apple: “What the Concord is among grapes, what the Bartlett has been among pears, the Baldwin is among apples.”