 Visit the Concord Free Public Library.  Join the Thoreau Society.  Explore the Walden Woods Project.  Learn more at the Concord Museum.  Explore Thoreau's ideas in the house where he was born: Thoreau Farm Trust. |
Concord, Massachusetts
Thoreau’s Birthplace:Thoreau was born in a farmhouse on Virginia Road, about a mile and a half from Concord Center. Read more... 
Walden Pond:Thoreau lived at Walden Pond from July 4, 1845 until September 6, 1847, when he moved into Ralph Waldo Emerson's house on Lexington Road. Read more... 
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery:Thoreau died of turberculosis on May 6, 1862 at the age of 44. He is buried near Emerson, Elizabeth Peabody, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and other luminaries on Authors Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Read more... 
Concord Battleground:"We were soon floating past the first regular battleground of the Revolution, resting on our oars between the still visible abutments of that " North Bridge," over which in April, 1775, rolled the first faint tide of that war, which ceased not, till, as we read on the stone on our right, it 'gave peace to these United States.'" H.D. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Read more... 
Concord Jail:In July 1846, just over a year into his sojourn at Walden, Thoreau was walking into town when he was arrested and taken to jail by Sam Staples, the Concord constable, for failure to pay his poll tax. "It is true," he recounted later, "I might have resisted forcibly...might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party." Read more... 
Orchard House:Thoreau spent a great deal of time with the Alcott family, especially Bronson Alcott, a close friend, and Louisa May Alcott, the second oldest of Bronson and Abba Alcott's four daughters. L.M. Alcott, who attended Concord Academy, the school that Thoreau and his brother John founded in 1838, expressed her grief over his death in 1862 in "Thoreau's Flute," a poem published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1863. Read more... 
Old Manse:Built in 1770, the Old Manse stands steps away from the Old North Bridge where, in 1775, the "shot heard round the world" signaled the start of the American Revolution. The house was occupied first by Rev. William Emerson, grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson, then, after William Emerson died while serving as a ... Read more... 
Town House:The Town House, which included the town hall, library, classrooms, and offices when it was built in 1851, provides particular insight into Thoreau's active involvement in community life in Concord. During the planning phase of its construction, the Building Committee paid him $4 to survey the property. Later, he complained that the Committee had set ... Read more... 
Emerson House:In 1835, after his marriage to Lydia Jackson, whom he called "Lidian," Ralph Waldo Emerson moved from the Old Manse, his family home, to his own house on Concord Turnpike. Known as "Coolidge Castle" after its former owner, but renamed "Bush" by its new inhabitants, the house attracted streams of visitors ... Read more... |
