Concord, Massachusetts
Name something that’s spookier than Boston at Halloween. I dare you.
In October, as the leaves started to change and a chill settled into the air, Matt and I did something we haven’t done since college: we took a trip to Boston with friends!
My best friend Kelsey (of Kelsey Prater Photography) and her husband lived in Boston for a few years after college, and they know the city like the back of their hands. When Matt expressed a desire to go somewhere “that screams fall” for Halloween, Boston immediately came to mind, and the four of us whipped up this vacation.
Together, we chose the absolutely cutest Airbnb in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a neighborhood north of Boston.
And since we were visiting with our best photographer friend, we of course had a cozy Airbnb photoshoot.
After dropping our bags, we grabbed a bite to eat at a local coffee shop (where the Bostonian accents truly surprised us) and then headed to the train station. It was past time for a history lesson. The commuter rail from Cambridge took us westward out of the city to the little town of Concord, Massachusetts.
You may be familiar with Concord as the site of a famous battle at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, or the home to Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), Louisa May Alcott (Little Women), and Henry David Thoreau (Walden).
When we arrived in Concord, Matt and I were a bit lost at first, as it seemed the train had stopped in a residential neighborhood. Luckily, we had befriended a drama professor on the commute over, and he kindly walked us into Concord’s town center, which is only a fifteen-minute stroll from the station.
We were immediately enchanted by the color of the fall leaves, the briskness of the autumn weather, and the charming homes that looked like they’d been around since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. More so, most of the homes were decorated for Halloween, which made the experience that much spookier. Our first stop in Concord was an antique shop called Thoreauly Antiques, where we sipped hot teas while perusing all types of artwork, manuscripts, and jewelry.
With hot drinks warming our hands, we next wandered to the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Don’t be confused—this isn’t the Sleepy Hollow that the Haunted Horseman spooks (that’s in New York), but this graveyard was equally chilling.
The cemetery was (no pun intended) completely dead when we entered, and we didn’t dare to speak above a whisper as we stared at graves with tombstones dating from the 1600s.
We even found the sleepiest part of the cemetery, the Author’s Ridge, where we saw the graves of the famous authors who died while living in Concord—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to name a few.
Afterwards, we happened upon the Concord River, which cuts through town, and followed it to the Old Manse, which both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne called home for a time while living in Concord. The most fascinating part about this building was the old poetry lines that Nathaniel and his wife Sophia had etched into the windowpanes during the first years of their married life.
From the upstairs windows of the Old Manse, it was easy for us to spot the Old North Bridge (or a restoration of the Old North Bridge, which had been around since 1775).
The town of Concord and its Old North Bridge played an extremely important role in the Revolutionary War: they are the sites of the first real skirmish of the war. (You may recall that the “shot heard round the world” was fired in nearby Lexington).
On the evening of April 18, 1775, British General Thomas Gage sent approximately 700 of his soldiers to Concord to destroy military equipment thought to be stockpiled in town. In his orders to his Lieutenant Colonel, General Gage ordered that he take control of the North Bridge to prevent the “rebels” from slipping away. The British sent 96 men to the North Bridge that day to guard it.
Enter the Minute Men, the colonial militia of 400 men who positioned themselves at the high ground overlooking the bridge (they’d been tipped off that “the British are coming” by one Paul Revere, galloping on his famous midnight ride from Lexington).
Sometime after nine in the morning, the militiamen, thinking that the British were burning Concord, marched onto the bridge. Outnumbered, the British soldiers retreated across the bridge and then fired a warning shot at the militia. This warning shot soon escalated into into a volley of return shots from both sides. The colonists continued marching, until their leader, Major Buttrick, gave the order to “fire, for God’s sake fellow soldiers fire!” The British, outmanned and outmaneuvered, fled to safety.
We spent some time in Minuteman National Historic Park, admiring the view of the Concord River from the bridge and drinking in the historical significance of this part of the land, before walking the wooded pathways near the water and touring the Minuteman museum.
Had we a bit more time on our visit, we would have walked to nearby Walden Pond, the inspiration for Henry David Thoreau’s most famous work, Walden. However, the autumn sun set early on our adventures through history, and as night fell, it simply became too cold to linger on the battlefields of old. We capped off our night with steaming hot bowls of ramen in Cambridge with my oldest and best friend Kathryn, who was visiting for a medical school conference, and then exhausted, fell into bed.
