Few people have watched that process longer than Maynard Forbes. He arrived in West Concord in 1951 at fourteen and, nearly seventy-five years later, still describes the village in terms of three forces that preceded him: “The railroad, the prison, and industry. Those are the entities that developed West Concord as we know it today.”

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?

That was certainly true when Target Painting was called to work on the historic Daniel Chester French House, built around 1787. French became on of America’s most celebrated sculptors. His Minute Man statue, unveiled at Concord’s North Bridge in 1875, became an American icon; decades later, he created the monumental statue of a seated Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.

The bull attack occurred on her farm on Virginia Road in 1940, when she was fifty years old. Fortunately, she recovered from her injuries. Wrangling cattle was not an ordinary occupation for a Vassar graduate with a colonial Massachusetts pedigree, but Ruth was not an ordinary woman.

Even then, Canty was thinking big. Today, the ideas she put into practice in West Concord have reached one of the culinary world’s most respected stages. Woods Hill Pier 4, her restaurant overlooking Boston Harbor, has earned a MICHELIN Guide recommendation—an impressive milestone in a journey that began close to home.

The traditional opening line of a bardic tale, “In the times before history,” indicated a story from before the written word existed. The bards were among the Celtic world’s early historians, learning verbatim from other bards the passed-down histories of their regions, memorizing the genealogies of kings and noble houses (establishing the rights of succession), and preserving current events by composing their own tales of honor, treachery, and all that occurred in between. Many bards were harp players and would accompany their tales with strains from metal or gut harp strings.

If you dare, read on.

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.”

Orchards filled with apple trees laden with fruit are a sight to behold. Each orchard offers its own unique experience, and many offer pick-your-own fruit opportunities. Go early, and you could find additional fruits like peaches, plums, nectarines, or late-season raspberries; go later, and pumpkins might be in the mix.

We hope you enjoy exploring these vibrant communities!

To truly appreciate this building, let’s journey back to a pivotal moment in history. 

The English named this place Concord in 1635, but it had long been known by the region’s first peoples as Musketaquid. In the Algonquian language, the name means “grassy river” or “grassy island,” and the Sudbury, Assabet, and Concord Rivers have always been the lifeblood of the land. As Lemuel Shattuck recounts in his 1835 History of Concord, the local people lived “[by] planting, hunting, or fishing . . . and few places produced a supply more easily than Musketaquid.” ¹