Victor Curran

Shortly after sunrise, Reuben Brown crouched on a hill just outside the center of Lexington, Massachusetts. He was out of breath from his six-mile ride from Concord, and what he saw didn’t make him breathe any easier. More than 700 British troops were on the road, and 70-odd provincial militia were all that stood between them and Concord. 

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

Victor Curran: On the Concord Free Public Library website, you wrote, “It is a very exciting time to get to know the staff, to serve this wonderful community and all those who support the library.” 

The Thoreau Society (thoreausociety.org) is a Concord-based organization with members all over the world. One of the most dedicated is Donna Marie Przybojewski, who teaches at St. Benedict Catholic School in Garfield Heights, Ohio. Five years ago, she set out to share her passion for the author of Walden—“not just [to] introduce Henry to children, but to help them develop a relationship with him.”

The result was “Saunter the Year with Henry David Thoreau,” a year-long, interdisciplinary curriculum for kindergarten through eighth grade students. (In the classroom she often appears in character as Henry, beard and all.) Resources for such an ambitious curriculum were scarce, so Donna Marie began writing and illustrating books for elementary and middle school readers, presenting vignettes of Thoreau’s life and describing his ideas in age-appropriate ways.

“Why Concord?” asks historian Robert A. Gross in the preface to his new book, The Transcendentalists and Their World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). One drizzly October afternoon I asked him the same question about his own choice to devote much of his career to examining this singular dot on the map of New England. 

“I came to study Concord not because I was interested in the local history,” he said. “I was interested in the local history as it helped to tell a national history. And I’ve come to love living here. I love the fact that I’m telling a large story with broad implications in one place, a place that is not a backwater, not on the margins.”

One autumn day in Monument Square, a visitor asked me about Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. “Is that the one in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow?” he wanted to know.

“No, that one is in New York,” I smiled. (I hear that question a lot.) “There’s no headless horseman here.”

“Then who’s that?” he asked, pointing over my shoulder. I spun around to see a figure all in black, strumming a black guitar as he cruised through the roundabout on his bicycle. But the weirdest part was, his head was conspicuously absent.

Concord’s cycling minstrel goes by the name of Slam Dunkle, and he’s irresistibly drawn to novel ideas and opportunities. A couple of years ago, he spotted a broken guitar in a trash barrel, put it back together, and painted it black. Then he painted his beach cruiser bicycle black to match. He found a bargain-priced headless horseman outfit in a costume shop, and voilà, the headless horseman materialized.

It was April 1900, and the First Parish in Concord was putting the finishing touches on a splendid renovation of its historic meetinghouse on Lexington Road. No expense had been spared, for in a few days the parish would celebrate Easter Sunday, and less than a week later, the town would gather in its pews to honor the 125th anniversary of the minutemen’s victory at the North Bridge.

“Is not all the summer akin to a paradise?” wrote Henry David Thoreau in 1852. This summer seems especially heavenly as we start to travel and enjoy social activities safely again. Concord has much to offer literary pilgrims, Revolutionary War buffs, and nature lovers from near and far. 

The people of Massachusetts were slow to anger, but when they got mad, there was hell to pay. They protested the Stamp Act in 1765, but they remained British subjects. They denounced the killing of five civilians in the Boston Massacre in 1770, but they didn’t strike back against the soldiers who patrolled their streets. 

What finally provoked them to take up arms was a play by the English government to disenfranchise them—in effect, to suppress their voting rights. The Massachusetts Government Act, passed by the British Parliament in May 1774, was the most intolerable of the so-called Intolerable Acts.

In the early spring of 1862, as the first buds began to appear, two men made their way along Main Street. Concord knew this pair well; over the last twenty years, these “knights of the umbrella and bundle”¹ had rambled together from the Walden Woods to Montreal, from Cape Cod to the Catskills.  

Henry Thoreau had been the more vigorous of the two, but today the poet Ellery Channing offered Henry an arm to lean on as he paused to catch his breath. His tuberculosis was growing worse, and his faithful friend Ellery had come to walk this familiar path with him for what might be the last time.