Field Trip to Historic Concord Email

 It's all boring and normal until you get to the bottom. LOL LOL LOL.  I love being here.. I didn't realize how fun bookish nerdyness could be!

Meet:  11:15-11:20am on Porter Square commuter rail platform

(see entrance, separate from subway entrance, on plaza)

Depart: 11:30am sharp (arrive in Concord 12:03pm)

Return: 3:31pm from Concord train station (arrive in Porter Square 4:02pm)

Highlights: downtown Concord; the Old North Bridge (American Revolution battleground site); and the Old Manse (home of philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s family; residence of novelist/short story writer Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Additional sites to choose from, time permitting –or for those who’d like to return on the later 5:58pm train: Authors’ Ridge (gravesites of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts); Orchard House (home of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women); Emerson House (where an HGSE grad will soon be living as caretaker); Walden Pond (subject of Thoreau’s eponymous book); Great Meadows Wildlife Refuge; Concord Museum….

Costs: $12.50 train fare ($6.25 one-way fare to and fro Concord); $6 admission fee to Old Manse

Reasonable Suggestions: *Wear your walking shoes, because we’ll probably be walking three miles or so (five or more if you go to Walden Pond to swim afterward and catch the later train). *Bring your lunch—or enough change to buy a quick sandwich on the way to the Old North Bridge and the Old Manse— so that we can picnic in the meadow by the river. (We have a 1pm tour scheduled at the Old Manse.) *Do a few minutes of online research about Concord if you’re not familiar with the American Revolution or the Transcendentalist literary movement!

Unreasonable Suggestion: *Read the complete works of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Alcotts (Louisa May and her father, Bronson), Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and all of the Abolitionist poets and philosophers who were tromping around eastern Massachusetts back then!