Concord bound

The week after I finished my first faculty development seminar of the summer (the second happens in early August), I was off to Boston and then to Maine (to visit with my husband's sister and her family) and then to Concord, where I attended and presented at the main conference on Nathaniel Hawthorne held every two years (it's in Florence in 2012!).

Landing in Boston works like a picker-upper charm for me, not only because it's the city where I was born, but also because I was very much formed as the person I am during the seven years I spent in that vicinity between college and my first graduate school venture. But my stay in Boston was short since I had to hop quickly on a bus to Portland, Maine, to meet up with my husband, who was there already after taking off earlier in the week on his new motorcycle for what turned about to be about 2,500 miles of traveling (yikes!).

The visits to Maine, while short and far between for me, are always pleasant (my sister-in-law is a consummate hostess, quite the Martha Stewart, as she herself acknowledges). With her usual generosity, she loaned her car to us so my husband could drive me to Concord and prevented me from having to take the bus back to Boston, two lines of the T to reach North Station and the MBTA to Concord for about a 2-mile walk from the train to the inn. Instead, my husband drove me up to the door of the colonial inn, built in 1716, where I spent three nights and attended the best conference I have been to yet in many years of attending such events.

Concord is a delightful town where a surprising amount of U.S. history all convenes, from the town's own foundation in 1635, to "the shot heard around the world" in 1775, to Nathaniel Hawthorne's two households, the first he inhabited as a relatively unknown writer with his wife, Sophia, known as "The Old Manse," and the last he inhabited with his entire family, as an established author, "The Wayside," to Thoreau's lovely Walden Pond. (Locals pride themselves on the fact that there is no public transportation in Concord...)



The Old Manse is beautiful and it's truly breathtaking to see the desk that Sophia had built for Nathaniel, the window from where he said he could see the monument to the Concord battle, the two window panes on which Sophia and Nathaniel wrote messages to posterity (the sense that these two people had of their futurity is impressive) using her diamond ring to cut the glass, and the large garden plot, which stands as it was, and which the financially strapped Nathaniel tended to provide sustenance for his fledgling family.

A visit to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (don't you just love the name?) is a must, especially to walk to Author's Ridge where the nineteenth-century American greats are buried near each other. I can only imagine the fantastic ghostly conversations that most go on when they all convene after the clock strikes midnight, if legend is to be believed. Louisa May Alcott's gravestone is as straightforward as she was, while Thoreau's is the example of simplicity. Hawthorne, Sophia and their first-born Una, born in The Old Manse, are all buried together, while Emerson rests below a large marble rock.




A new acquaintance at the conference offered to drive me and another conference friend to Walden Pond and I was delighted. A replica of Thoreau's cabin is open for all to see and a statue of Thoreau ponders Transcendentalism. The pond itself (which, as one of Hawthorne's biographers will quip is only called a pond by New Englanders) is huge, more of a lake than I could possibly imagine.


All in all, the visit to Concord was excellent, not only because my husband could be there with me and I was able to spend time with my dissertation co-director, the woman responsible for my becoming an Americanist, but also because of the papers I heard, the people I met, the new things about Hawthorne, Transcendentalism and the American 19th century, which I learned, and because it made me feel like a scholar (albeit a newbie one) among established scholars. I also got to handle the manuscript of Hawthorne's last unfinished work, The Dolliver Romance, which legend has it was taken from the top of his coffin before he was buried.

It was truly exciting and not a bit eerie to see Hawthorne's handwriting on a last manuscript with little or no corrections made, as if he was taking dictation rather than composing in starts and stops, like Thoreau's manuscript of "Walking" shows.

The visit to Concord was the source of great new memories and also revved my scholarly engines so that I have added two new writing projects for what remains of the summer and now have a solid plan to revise the structure and content of my 400-level Hawthorne seminar, which I will teach in spring 2011. Best of all, I'm making plans to return (perhaps this fall?) so I can mine the Concord Free Public Library's resources some more and visit the Harvard collections as well.