A Transcendental Road Trip

What do cloth-covered wire manufacturers see when they are sightseeing?  Let me tell you….

On a whim, Jim and I went to Concord, Massachusetts, this weekend, about ninety miles from our home in Northampton. While Concord is best known for being, along with Lexington, MA, the location of “the shot heard around the world“, the beginning of the fighting in the American Revolutionary War, it was also home to several of America’s shining literary lights of the nineteenth century, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who coined that famous phrase, as well as being the founder of the Transcendentalist Movement.   Just west of Boston, the road between Boston and Concord is the location of Paul Revere’s famous ride.

Jim and I visited the Minute Man National Park, a large national park covering much of the road along which that first battle of the Revolution took place.  Also part of the park is a house called Wayside: Home of Authors.  This is a house where several famous American authors lived, the Alcotts, including Louisa May, author of Little Women and its sequels, Nathaniel Hawthorne, author, most famously, of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, and Margaret Sydney (real name Harriett Lothrop), author of the children’s book series, The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew.