Experience the site of two American revolutions: the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired nearby – and, less than century later, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau spawned a revolution in American philosophy from here. What makes the Old Manse a special place? Built in 1770 for patriot minister William Emerson, The Old Manse, a National Historic Landmark, became the center of Concord’s political, literary, and social revolutions over the course of the next century. In the mid-19th-century, leading Transcendentalists such as Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller discussed the issues of the day here, with the Hawthorne and Ripley families. |