One April morning in 1872, William Brewster (1851-1919) took the train from Cambridge to Concord to go birdwatching with a friend. Making their way to a nearby farm, a local resident expressed surprise at their coming all the way from Boston to hear a Woodcock sing.
The world’s most famous grape began its life in a backyard in Concord. In the 1840s, Ephraim Wales Bull retired to the countryside to become a horticulturist after a career as a gold beater in Boston. At his farm, Bull set out to cultivate a variety of grape that would better withstand early frosts and severe winters. He did 22,000 crossbreeding experiments on 125 vines and in 1849 discovered a wild grape he thought looked promising – it was sweet, palatable, and hardy – and began to propagate it. He named this grape the Concord.
Museums do not often get to reinvent themselves, but the Concord Museum seized this once-in-a-generation opportunity after renovating their main building and constructing a new Education Center in 2018. Years in the making, the curatorial team took advantage of over a dozen empty galleries and a world-class collection and embarked on a major project that would transform the Concord Museum and visitor experience. This August, that exciting and challenging process concluded with the opening of ten new permanent galleries.
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.
On the morning of April 19, 1775, 71-year-old Martha Moulton witnessed a terrifying scene: hundreds of red-coated British Regulars marching into the town of Concord. These men were on orders from British General Thomas Gage to seize and destroy contraband military supplies stockpiled by the Provincial Congress. The ensuing conflict between the Regulars and Provincials sparked the American Revolution.
On a cold winter’s day in 1982, Loring Wilkins Coleman (1918-2015) embarked on one of his favorite activities: driving around Massachusetts to look at old barns and houses. On the recommendation of his son Andrew, Coleman went to the town of Sterling in search of a “superb grouping of buildings,” and struck gold. “It was indeed one of the most handsome New England farms I had ever seen,” recalled Coleman. It took ten days to complete a detailed pencil drawing of the farm buildings, but it wasn’t until 2003 that Coleman finished his painting of the view.
