Literary Stroll of Concord, MA

Most people come to Concord for one of two things: the Revolution or the writers. This walk is about the writers, but also about the town’s third identity, the one that’s easiest to overlook. For roughly thirty years in the middle of the nineteenth century, this compact New England town was simultaneously the literary capital of America and one of the most committed antislavery communities in the country. The same streets that Thoreau walked, the same houses where Louisa May Alcott wrote, the same meeting halls where Emerson lectured, those are also the streets and houses and halls where free Black families built lives, where fugitives were sheltered, and where Frederick Douglass found early audiences. This tour tells both stories at once, because they aren’t two stories. They’re one.