#Concord House

[majaloveschris]

I will miss you Concord...you were my favorite 🖤

[insidecroydon]

More than 200 families split up by council's housing department

CROYDON IN CRISIS: As it struggles to find suitable accommodation for the borough’s homeless families, official figures show that the council has split up one family placed in temporary accommodation for 12 years. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES Notorious: Croydon Council, under Conservative and Labour leadership, have continued to use B&Bs like Gilroy Court for temporary accommodation Official…

[musette22]

Goodnight from Concord 🫶🏼💫🍂

[fireangelsstuff]

Random observation:

I've speculated before that the house in Carlisle was for Jeremy Renners show Rennervations

The house itself is a beautiful old Georgian revival (Ooof dream house personally, even if it is a little big for my two person family and I wouldn't want to be vacuuming THAT all of the time, I 💕 old houses, have you ever followed "Buildings of New England" on the gram 😍)

I've observed the L&D situation for a while and have never seen anything that matched the Carlisle place on either their grid or in their stories

What's more is the video of 🐟 playing video games doesn't match any of the known images of any of Christopher's residences...

Here's my theory:

The delay in any reveal of the renovation of the house was due to it being purchased for the purposes of participation in Jeremy's show

If you've watched it you'll notice that most of these projects are for someone else benefit as a way of giving back to the community

This is something that Christopher has done before for his mother (we know that boy loves his Mama) with the Concord Youth Theatre which she runs where he helped rescue and renovate an old church so that the group would have a permanent home 🏘️

What is one of his other favourite charities that is locally based? Christopher's Haven

What if the Carlisle residence is not a place for him to live, but a house purchased with the intention of joining in with Renner on giving back to one of his favourite charities? A residence for families to stay in while their children are receiving treatment

It sounds much more like something Christopher would elect to participate in 🙏

But because of the strikes, nothing can be promoted or confirmed, even by L&D.....

Just my opinion

🤍🪽✨

[artisthomes]

Orchard House, home of Louisa May Alcott, in Concord, Massachusetts, United States

[mariocki]

RIP Ruggero Deodato (7.5.1939 - 29.12.2022)

"I've been doing the rounds for about ten years, doing the festivals, where I'm invited for Cannibal Holocaust, you know, and other fairly violent movies; festivals that specialise in exploitation style movies. The people I've met there, the fanbase, the people who actually pay to go and see the movies, the people who take part, are the nicest, most lovely people I've ever met. They may be scary in appearance, with piercings, tattoos and stuff, but they arrive at these conventions with their kids in the prams, dressed up as little devils, but it's like a carnival. They changed my mind about people's appearance; they're incredibly peaceful. These festivals, these conventions, are about having fun in a very peaceful way; it's just a fun weekend."

[echthr0s]

Skinamarink 🤝 Bethesda games items just disappearing from the world for seemingly no ass reason and other items occasionally appearing in the absolute wrong location and orientation

[cinemaquiles]

O CINEMA DE RUGGERO DEODATO EM DEZ FILMES PARA CONHECER OU REVER SEU TRABALHO!

[majaloveschris]

Too many people knew where he was living, I think that's all. He is probably tired of people very well knowing his address, and maybe people were even violating his privacy over there, which wouldn't be surprising since people knew his full address. And Concord isn't that big. He didn't have huge fences or a whole ass group of security there, so it was kind of dangerous over there.

Some people are already knew his new house adress too and carlisle house also didnt have that huge fences and security too. I think the only reason why he sold that house cause he want to move to the bigger house (carlisle is bigger right?) to build a family there. I hate that theory but that seems makes sense

I mean, I didn't say I think he was moving to Carlisle. Yeah, it's obviously a possibility since he owns it and renovated it, but that's a huge ass house, even if they'd move there together. 

Concord had 5 bedrooms, which would've been more than enough to start a family, and turning like 3 of them into bedrooms for kids would've been much cheaper than renovating a whole ass house. Carlisle has 7 bedrooms; even if they would have kids and visitors, it's way too much. And it has a quest house too. The Concord house would've been more than enough for them. So I doubt it's about space. 

The Concord house was much better for Dodger too, and he isn't getting younger. 

Both addresses are known. They won't have privacy in Carlisle either. People were posting about renovations and satellite pictures of the house, so yeah, those people who knew the Concord adress know the Carlisle one too, so what's the point in that? It's probably not about that either.

To be honest, I just can't see Chris living in that house. It's huge, and to me it seems too expensive and garish for his taste, but what do I know, right? I just can't really see that man who wears the same caps and belt for years and who had the same phone for decades living in that house. But we will see.

[insidecroydon]

Council tenants in challenge to Perry over 'uninhabitable' flats

A group of residents placed in what they describe as “uninhabitable” temporary accommodation by Croydon Council have issued their own Christmas message – and a challenge to Tory Mayor Jason Perry. Gilroy Court: the B&B featured on a shocking Newsnight TV report in 2012 – but Croydon has continued to use the unsuitable accommodation ever since “Change needs to happen now,” says the Croydon…

[riverass-cleaning-solutions]

House Cleaning Concord CA

[waytray]

Concorde - Summer House

[foundationsolution]

https://www.yelp.com/biz/foundation-solutions-santa-clara

[beggars-opera]

On the road leading into the center of Concord, Massachusetts, there sits a house.

It is a plain, colonial-style house, of which there are many along this road. It has sea green and buff paint, a historical plaque, and one of the most multi-layered stories I have ever encountered to showcase that history is continuous, complicated, and most importantly, fragmentary, unless you know where to look.

So, where to start? The plaque.

There's some usual information here: Benjamin Barron built the house in 1716, and years later it was a "witness house" to the start of the American Revolution. And then, something unusual: a note about an enslaved man named John Jack whose epitaph is "world famous."

Where is this epitaph? Right around the corner in the town center.

It reads:

God wills us free; man wills us slaves. I will as God wills; God’s will be done. Here lies the body of JOHN JACK a native of Africa who died March 1773 aged about 60 years Tho’ born in a land of slavery, He was born free. Tho’ he lived in a land of liberty, He lived a slave. Till by his honest, tho’ stolen labors, He acquired the source of slavery, Which gave him his freedom; Tho’ not long before Death, the grand tyrant Gave him his final emancipation, And set him on a footing with kings. Tho’ a slave to vice, He practised those virtues Without which kings are but slaves.

We don't know precisely when the man first known only as Jack was purchased by Benjamin Barron. We do know that he, along with an enslaved woman named Violet, were listed in Barron's estate upon his death in 1754. Assuming his gravestone is accurate, at that time Jack would have been about 40 and had apparently learned the shoemaking trade from his enslaver. With his "honest, though stolen labors" he was then able to earn enough money to eventually purchase his freedom from the remaining Barron family and change his name to John, keeping Jack as a last name rather than using his enslaver's.

John Jack died, poor but free, in 1773, just two years before the Revolutionary War started. Presumably as part of setting up his own estate, he became a client of local lawyer Daniel Bliss, brother-in-law to the minister, William Emerson. Bliss and Emerson were in a massive family feud that spilled into the rest of the town, as Bliss was notoriously loyal to the crown, eventually letting British soldiers stay in his home and giving them information about Patriot activities.

Daniel Bliss also had abolitionist leanings. And after hearing John's story, he was angry.

Here was a man who had been kidnapped from his home country, dragged across the ocean, and treated as an animal for decades. Countless others were being brutalized in the same way, in the same town that claimed to love liberty and freedom. Reverend Emerson railed against the British government from the pulpit, and he himself was an enslaver.

It wouldn't do. John Jack deserved so much more. So, when he died, Bliss personally paid for a large gravestone and wrote its epitaph to blast the town's hypocrisy from the top of Burial Hill. When the British soldiers trudged through the cemetery on April 19th, 1775, they were so struck that they wrote the words down and published them in the British newspapers, and that hypocrisy passed around Europe as well. And the stone is still there today.

You know whose stone doesn't survive in the burial ground?

Benjamin Barron's.

Or any of his family that I know of. Which is absolutely astonishing, because this story is about to get even more complicated.

Benjamin Barron was a middle-class shoemaker in a suburb that wouldn't become famous until decades after his death. He lived a simple life only made possible by chattel slavery, and he will never show up in a U.S. history textbook.

But he had a wife, and a family. His widow, Betty Barron, from whom John purchased his freedom, whose name does not appear on her home's plaque or anywhere else in town, does appear either by name or in passing in every single one of those textbooks.

Terrible colonial spelling of all names in their marriage record aside, you may have heard her maiden name before:

Betty Parris was born into a slaveholding family in 1683, in a time when it was fairly common for not only Black, but also Indigenous people to be enslaved. It was also a time of war, religious extremism, and severe paranoia in a pre-scientific frontier. And so it was that at the age of nine, Betty pointed a finger at the Arawak woman enslaved in her Salem home, named Titibe, and accused her of witchcraft.

Yes, that Betty Parris.

Her accusations may have started the Salem Witch trials, but unlike her peers, she did not stay in the action for long. As a minor, she was not allowed to testify at court, and as the minister's daughter, she was too high-profile to be allowed near the courtroom circus. Betty's parents sent her to live with relatives during the proceedings, at which point her "bewitchment" was cured, though we're still unsure if she had psychosomatic problems solved by being away from stress, if she stopped because the public stopped listening, or if she stopped because she no longer had adults prompting her.

Following the witch hysteria, the Parrises moved several times as her infamous father struggled to hold down a job and deal with his family's reputation. Eventually they landed in Concord, where Betty met Benjamin and married him at the age of 26, presumably having had no more encounters with Satan in the preceding seventeen years. She lived an undocumented life and died, obscure and forgotten, in 1760, just five years before the Stamp Act crisis plunged America into a revolution, a living bridge between the old world and the new.

I often wonder how much Betty's story followed her throughout her life. People must have talked. Did they whisper in the town square, "Do you know what she did when she was a girl?" Did John Jack hear the stories of how she had previously treated the enslaved people in her life? Did that hasten his desperation to get out? And what of Daniel Bliss; did he know this history as well, seeing the double indignity of it all? Did he stop and think about how much in the world had changed in less than a century since his neighbor was born?

We'll never know.

All that's left is a gravestone, and a house with an insufficient plaque.

[heathclean]

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[totally-lit-road-trips]

Chapter 23: Revolutions on a Rainy Day

Welcome back to my Totally Lit Road Trip blog, where the lit stands for literary! 

Today was our second full day in Concord, MA, and despite the steadily increasing rain, we managed to pack in a ton of literary sightseeing.

Our first stop was The Old Manse, a residence where both Ralph Waldo Emerson (who preferred to go by Waldo) and Nathanial Hawthorne lived at some point in their lives. Our tour guide was so knowledgeable and since it was just me and Jess on this tour, it was like having a private guide all to ourselves again. 

The first thing our guide stressed was that historians see The Old Manse as the birthplace of two different revolutions - The American Revolution, and the Cultural Revolution of Transcendentalism. The home was built in 1769 by Rev. William Emerson (Waldo’s grandfather), who was the minister of Concord. He married the former minister’s daughter, Phebe Bliss. Known as the “Patriot Preacher,” Rev. Emerson was heavily into politics and supported the revolution, making him very popular with his congregation. 

From the window of one of the upstairs bedrooms that would later become Waldo’s bedroom/study, Phebe Emerson and her five children, one of whom would become Waldo’s father, could see the literal beginning of the American Revolution - the first shots fired at the North Bridge. Years later, Waldo would coin the term “the shot heard round the world” in his 1837 poem “Concord Hymn,” which commemorated the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

Like his father and grandfather before him, Waldo’s first career path was that of a preacher, however, after the death of his first wife Ellen after only 18 months of marriage, Waldo felt he no longer had the calling of being a minister. Instead, he traveled around Europe for almost a year, meeting other leading authors of the time period, and beginning to shape his philosophies. From this point on, most of his income came from writing and speaking engagements. 

After the death of his grandfather, Waldo’s grandmother Phebe remarried, and it was years later when Waldo moved back to the house as an adult to care for his aging step-grandfather. During this time, he wrote “Nature,” the speech considered to be a founding text of the Transcendentalism movement.

Waldo was actually the person who suggested that Nathanial Hawthorne and his wife Sophia be taken on as renters of the home, and Hawthorne is the one who gave it the name “Old Manse”, manse being the British term for a minister’s home. Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia, lived there for about three years, during which he wrote the stories that would eventually come together to form his first successful book, Mosses from an Old Manse. He insisted on writing in the same room of the house which Waldo used as his study, although he had his desk face the wall because unlike Waldo, Hawthorne found nature to be distracting rather than inspiring. Sophia, and accomplished artist, spent much of her time in the house painting. Unfortunately, her last portrait, which she considered to be her best, is of whereabouts unknown.

The Hawthornes were eventually evicted because they were unable to continue paying their rent, due to a dry spell of both writing and artistic income. But they left their lasting marks on the home: Sophia engraved window panes with her diamond ring, and Nathanial left a hole in the house where he installed a stove in the kitchen. (He took the stove with them when they moved out.)

After this the Hawthornes moved to Salem, MA, where Nathanial would go on to write House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter, arguably his most famous work of fiction. They later moved back to Concord and lived at The Wayside, which is unfortunately not currently open to the public.

One of my favorite things in the house was a Steinway square grand piano, which is still in playable condition. In fact, the tour guides actually encourage guests to sit down and play a few chords to keep it in good working order! Obviously, I had to give it a go, and I can now say that I’ve played a square grand.

Another cool artifact in the house is a grandfather clock built in Limerick, Ireland, which still keeps accurate time when wound, and which stands in the original position in the house that it has occupied since Waldo’s grandfather purchased it.

The bookcases in the house are all built horizontally, and stacked on top of each other, unlike today’s bookshelves. Our tour guide told us that this is because the Emerson’s highly valued their tomes and wanted to be able to easily lift and slide the bookshelves out the windows in case of a fire.

And finally, I would be remiss if I failed to mention Longfellow, the preserved owl that resides at The Old Manse. Apparently no one know how he came to be in the house, but Nathanial Hawthorne found him in the attic when he moved in. The owl is believed to be from colonial times, meaning it existed before the house was built. Nathanial loved it and wanted it to be a centerpiece for conversation when guests came over, but Sophia was creeped out by it, leading to an unending “game” where she would hide it back up in the attic, and he would bring it down again and put it in a different room of the house.

After our wonderful tour of The Old Manse, we stopped for a quick bit to eat at Main Streets Café, where I had a mac ‘n cheese grilled cheese sandwich. That’s right folks, deep fried mac ‘n cheese wedges on a sandwich with even more delicious, cheesy gooiness. Highly recommend.

With our bellies full, we headed over to Emerson House, the home Emerson lived in with his second wife and four children.  Emerson House is massive! There are so many rooms and split-levels and doors that lead who knows where. You could get lost in there without a tour guide, but luckily we had a team of lovely women to lead us through the house both physically and historically. 

Unfortunately, you can’t take pictures inside Emerson House, but here’s me standing out front in the rain.

One of the coolest things about Emerson house is that, unlike the other authors’ homes in the areas which are all owned by trusts or preservation societies, Emerson House is still owned by direct descendants of Waldo. They take care of the upkeep and allow the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association to give tours.

Here are some interesting facts we learned about Emerson and his home, in no particular order:

In July 1872, a fire broke out in the attic of the home. Luckily, no one was injured, and they even managed to get all of the furniture (and more importantly, all of the books!) out in time. (Possible due to easily yeet-able bookshelves?) Due to smoke and water damage, the house was unlivable for a time. Emerson did have the house insured, but the whole town banded together to raise additional funds for restoring the home. Different neighbors also volunteered to keep the family’s belongings safe until the home was livable again.  While the house was being reconstructed, Emerson and his daughter traveled to Europe and Egypt, and when they returned, the town had a celebration in their honor, and even closed schools for the day!

Waldo was at least six feet tall, and as such would have to duck in some of the lower hallways of the home. He hung his gardening hat on a peg which only he was tall enough to reach.

The Emersons entertained visitors from all over, and Waldo almost never turned away guests, even unannounced ones. He was very generous if people asked for money, and never let anyone leave without a meal.

As a friend of Waldo, Henry David Thoreau lived in the house for long spans of time on multiple occasions. He typically stayed in the room that was meant to be for Waldo’s brother Charles, who tragically died before his wedding. It took Waldo 10 years to finish the room and eventually make it the master bedroom, but Thoreau stayed there frequently. He was a fan favorite of Emerson’s four children, who could often see him approaching the carriage entrance from their window in the nursery. They loved him because he made good popcorn and told good stories.

Waldo was a great friend to the Alcott family. He allowed Louisa May Alcott to use his library and often gave her book recommendations. Alcott’s first book, Flower Fables, is dedicated to Waldo’s daughter, Ellen. Waldo also lent many pieces of art to Louisa’s sister, the artist May Alcott, including one piece that was a wedding gift! She would make copies of the paintings, a common practice for aspiring artists at the time.

And finally, every single room in Emerson House has at least one bookshelf. That right there is life goals.

Right across the street from Emerson House is the Concord Museum, so that was our next stop. This museum has many interactive exhibits and mainly focuses on Concord’s Revolutionary War history, although it does also have a fair share of local author and artist history, as well. 

One of the first things you encounter in the museum’s foyer is a replica of Thoreau’s writing desk, which you can sit at and write in a little notebook there.

The original green desk is in one of the galleries as you walk through.

The museum also has many odds and ends from the different local authors. One is Emerson’s writing desk, which was originally green, but then he later painted it black. The replica that resides at The Old Manse is green. 

One of Louisa May Alcott’s tea kettles, which she brought with her when she served as a Civil War nurse, is also at the museum. 

Also on display is the entirety of Emerson’s study, displayed exactly as they were in his lifetime. Everything in the room is the original!

Finally, there is a room dedicated to Thoreau’s belongings, including his bed frame, a wooden flute, and some pencils and surveying tools.

A large portion of the Concord population were abolitionists, and although she was not a native of Concord, the museum does have a first edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was originally published in two volumes.

We were lucky enough to be visiting during the Concord Free Public Library’s 150 Years of Art Celebration, so there was a special exhibit with art pieces that are usually at the library. This included busts of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Alcott, as well as one of May Alcott’s paintings. The largest piece in the library’s collection is a portrait of Emerson, with a rainbow in the background.

After leaving the museum, we browsed for a bit at Concord Bookshop and then drove over to Walden Pond once it finally stopped raining. There, we were able to visit the replica of Thoreau’s writing cabin, which is very small! The original cabin was located on the other side of the pond, but is no longer standing. Visitors who are into hiking can hike up to the point where the cabin once stood and where many admirers leave rocks as a sign that they’ve been there. (Not me and Jessica. We’re indoor people!)

We ended our night with some sushi at Karma (highly recommend the Golden Banana Roll...banana and eel, who knew?!), and ice cream at Bedford Farms, where their “small” is my “large”. 

In two and a half days, we managed to squeeze in every literary and historical attraction that we planned for, which is pretty impressive, especially considering the rain. It was definitely made easier by the fact that everything in Concord is so close to each other.

Before we head home tomorrow, we hope to stop by the North Bridge, the site of the beginning of the American Revolution. Hopefully the rain will hold up long enough to let us walk to the bridge and see Daniel Chester French’s Minute Man statue.

Stay tuned for more literary/historical adventures!

<3 Theresa