Concord usually gets attention for its past. Even Louisa May Alcott worried that her town was “degenerating into a museum of revolutionary relics.” She, of course, belonged to an intellectual event that gave a second chapter to Concord’s celebrated history, but the Concordian of today is liable to feel that everything great belongs to the past.
Brands thinks we get important facts backwards in regard to the loyalists. As he points out, historical retrospect leads us to treat the decision for independence as the default for Americans in the 1770s, but in fact the opposite was true.
Concord’s great tradition of writing lives on today. Here we highlight just two of the books published recently by Concordians: Alan Lightman’s Ada and the Galaxies, and Samantha Power’s The Education of an Idealist.
If, on a summer day, you drive down Sudbury Road toward Nine Acre Corner, then, having left the shade of the woods and passed by a line of sunlit fields, you will see a squat brown building standing amidst the rows of crops. This is the farm stand of Verrill Farm. This local family business has gone through many shapes and sizes over the course of its 100-year history, surviving economic changes and even a devastating fire, but it has always carried on in its mission to “nourish the body and soul of our customers by providing healthful food of superb flavor in surroundings of beauty.”
On a cold February day John Kaag went for a jog down Lowell Street and had a heart attack. This was no case of an out of shape man pushing himself too hard. On the contrary, Kaag is a lifelong runner and a formidable racer. Running, for Kaag, was akin to an ascetic practice. He found inspiration in legendary mountain-climbing monks in Tibet who use physical discipline to reach beyond human limitation and embody a pure ideal.
“I have traveled a good deal in Concord,” said Thoreau, with his usual Yankee irony. To explore this small town, far away from any oceans or urban centers, would not seem to qualify as “travel.” But Thoreau was a man who could see Homeric drama in the movements of an ant colony; a New England town, then, with its social and natural life, was more than enough to have “traveled a good deal” in. Thoreau belongs to a long line of Concordians who have taught us how to travel a good deal in seemingly quiet places.
When someone says, “Concord is a special place,” they could likely be referring to its history, whether that be its role in the American Revolution or its literary tradition. But those things belong, after all, to the past, and so they are more reasons for saying Concord was a special place than that it is. Many towns have history, especially in New England, but few of them, like Concord, retain the sense of a living historical legacy. Concord, then, is a special place, as much as it was a special place, because of a long and ongoing tradition of conservation. Conservation in Concord means caring both for historical sites and indigenous natural beauty, protecting lands from development, and keeping away pollution and invasive species. The shared commitment of residents, nonprofits, and state agencies has made the quality and extent of conservation in Concord exceptional, or, put otherwise, special.
