Category: Concord

The Wayside (1717)

by Dan//Colonial, Concord, Houses, Victorian Eclectic

The Wayside in Concord (not to be confused with Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury) is a historic home (now part of Minute Man National Historic Park) that was the residence of several famous authors over the years. The oldest part of the house may date to as early as 1717. Minuteman Samuel Whitney, who owned two slaves, lived in the house at time of the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. The first of the authors to live in the house was Louisa May Alcott, whose parents, Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott, owned it from 1845 to 1852. They named their home “Hillside” and made additions to the original saltbox structure (see image below). Many of Louisa’s experiences in the house were later incorporated in her famous book Little Women. The family would eventually move to Boston, but later in the 1850s would live back in Concord in nearby Orchard House. Nathaniel Hawthorne purchased the house from the Alcotts in 1852. Hawthorne renamed the house the Wayside and made his own additions to the building around 1860. He died in 1864 and his widow sold the house in 1870, but their daughter Rose and her husband, George P. Lathrop later owned it for a time, selling it in 1883 to Boston publisher Daniel Lothrop and his wife Harriett. Under the pen name Margaret Sidney, Harriett wrote The Five Little Peppers series of children’s books, published between 1881 and 1916. They added a large piazza to the west side of the house in 1887. The house was inherited in 1924 by their daughter, Margaret Mulford Lothrop (1884-1970), who worked to preserve the house and opened it for tours. Margaret also wrote a book about the house, The Wayside: Home of Authors (1940). In the 1960s, the house became the first literary site to be acquired by the National Park Service.
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Staples-Hutton House (1805)

by Dan//Colonial Revival, Concord, Houses, Queen Anne

The house at 215 Lexington Road in Concord has undergone a great deal of change over the centuries. The origins of the house lie in a two-story building known as the Old Gun House that once stood on Bedford Street near the center of town. It was built c. 1805 to house the two brass cannons of the Concord Artillery, which had been authorized the previous year. Sometime in the 1860s, developer Samuel Staples (1813-1895) moved the building to the current property on Lexington Road. In the 1840s he had served as the town jailer and in 1846 had jailed Henry David Thoreau for a night for nonpayment of his poll tax. Staples remodeled the former armory as his residence and lived in it for about ten years. In 1883, Benjamin H. Hutton, or Huttman (?), of New York purchased the house for himself and his family and soon after acquired the house at 201 Lexington Road, where his brother-in-law would live for some years. Huttman hired architect John Chapman to expand remodel both homes in the Queen Anne style. The family later had financial troubles and the house was sold at auction about 1911-1912. It was bought by Philip Flavin, a dentist who converted the building into a double house.

Anderson Market (1828)

by Dan//Commercial, Concord, Federal

The Concord Historic Buildings Website is a project of the Concord Free Public Library. It focuses on several buildings in town, providing a detailed history of each with links to related primary sources, many of which are held in the library’s William Munroe Special Collections. One of the buildings featured on the website is the former Anderson Market at 42-44 Main Street (listed as 32 Main Street in MACRIS). The website provides a detailed history of the building across 29 web pages with numerous links to primary material. The structure is one of the earliest of many commercial buildings erected by the Mill Dam Company, which developed Concord’s downtown starting in 1826. The building was surveyed by Henry David Thoreau in 1853. It was occupied by various businesses in the nineteenth century, including a hatter’s shop, a watch shop, a milliner, and eventually a succession of grocery stores. Lars Anderson and his son Leslie bought the business in 1913, establishing Anderson’s Market. Leslie married Esther Wheeler in 1920 and their son, David “Andy” Anderson, would become the third generation to run the market. In 1930 the building‘s facade was remodeled by architect Harry Britton Little. The market remained in business until 1978. The building is now owned by the fourth generation of the family, David Anderson and his wife Karen, who operate Main Streets Market & Cafe.

Union Block, Concord (1881)

by Dan//Commercial, Concord, Second Empire

The Union Block is a long commercial structure erected in 1881 at 18-16 Main Street in Concord. It was built in a section of the street known as the Milldam, where a dam and mill pond had existed in colonial times. The Milldam Company, incorporated in 1828, had drained the pond and replaced the dam with a gravel road, beginning the process of erecting new buildings in the town’s commercial center. The Union Block replaced three former stores that had stood on the site, including that of George Hunt, which had just burned down. Hunt moved into the west section of the new building, eventually selling his store to Albert Vanderhoof in 1904. Vanderhoof’s Hardware Store, now run by the fourth generation of the family, continues to occupy the space to this day. Numerous other stores have occupied the middle and east sections over the years.

Ralph Waldo Emerson House (1828)

by Dan//Concord, Greek Revival, Houses

The home of Ralph Waldo Emerson, where the philosopher, essayist, and poet lived from 1835 until his death in 1882, is located at 28 Cambridge Turnpike in Concord. The house was built in 1828 by the Coolidge family and was known as the “Coolidge Castle.” Emerson purchased it from John T. Coolidge for $3,500 and moved in just after he married his second wife, Lydia Jackson (called Lidian). Emerson had previously lived in Concord in his family’s home called the Old Manse. Emerson wrote numerous works while living in the house, which he called Bush, and had many famous visitors, including Henry David Thoreau, who lived with the Emersons at different times and built his famous cabin on Emerson’s land at Walden Pond. The house had to be extensively repaired after a fire in 1872. After Emerson’s death, his wife occupied it and then their unmarried daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson, until her death in 1909. Still owned by the Emerson family, the house opened to the public as a private museum in 1930. The contents of his study are now located at the Concord Museum, across the street.

St. Bernard’s Roman Catholic Church (1840)

by Dan//Churches, Concord, Italianate

The St. Bernard’s Catholic Church at 12 Monument Square in Concord was originally erected in 1840 or 1842 by the First Universalist Society in Concord. The small congregation encountered financial difficulties and ended its services in the early 1850s. The church stood empty until the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston purchased it in December 1863. Since the early 1850s, Concord’s growing Irish Catholic community had been a mission of St. Mary’s Parish in Waltham. Now the parish had its own church, St. Bernard’s, which became an independent parish in 1867. At the time, the church was still in its original location, separated from the common by the “old green store.” In 1870, the parish purchased the store in order to move the church forward towards the common. The church was also turned ninety degrees to face southwest toward the foot of Main Street and enlarged with a basement and extended to the rear to accommodate a new vestibule and sanctuary.

Renovations in 1889, designed in the Italianate style by local architect John Chapman, added a steeple and again enlarged the church. Changes were made to the front facade and new front stairs were added in 1959-1960, but another major renovation in 1996-1997 restored the church as much as possible to its late nineteenth-century appearance.

Our Lady Help of Christians Church was built in the industrial area of West Concord in 1904 and became a separate parish in 1908. The two Concord parishes merged in 2004 to form Holy Family Parish, based at St. Bernard’s Church. More recently, Holy Family Parish and St. Irene’s Church in Carlisle joined to form a new parish collaborative.

Concord Bank (1832)

by Dan//Banks, Concord, Greek Revival

The building at 46 Main Street in Concord was erected in 1832 for the Concord Bank (which later became the Concord National Bank) and the Middlesex Mutual Fire Insurance Company (incorporated in 1826), which occupied the first floor for many years. The Middlesex Institution for Savings was founded in 1835 and shared space with the Concord Bank on the second floor. Both institutions were robbed in a famous incident in 1865. By the 1880s, the insurance company had moved out of the first floor, part of which was then occupied by Frank Tuttle’s tailor shop. Starting in 1886, the post office was also located in the building for many years. When the bank vacated the second floor in 1894, Tuttle moved his tailoring business upstairs and continued there until his death in 1913, while the National and American Express companies had their offices on the first floor until 1914. Various office tenants and commercial businesses have occupied the building over the years.