Harmony, Massachusetts, is a city about 20 miles west of Boston and based in 1635. Harmony first gained recognition as being the positioning the place the “shot heard around the world” was fired on April 18, 1775, when the British troops stormed out of Boston and into Harmony seeking hidden weapons. After a conflict with the British in close by Lexington, the Harmony minutemen stopped the British on the North Bridge and the American Revolution was begun. All the scene was memorialized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s traditional poem, “The Midnight Journey of Paul Revere,” however this was not the only real defining second for Harmony. That may come within the subsequent century—when Harmony turned a magnet for the writers that created the primary masterpieces of American literature.
From 1840 till 1880, the Harmony writers included Louisa Could Alcott (Little Ladies), Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), Henry David Thoreau (Walden and Civil Disobedience) and the essayist and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (Emerson: Essays and Lectures).
At this time, Harmony stays a stately and delightful city that also has the white spires of the church towers rising above Harmony’s historical elms, maple, and oak timber. The commuter rail makes Harmony extra of a commuter city than a literary hub of genius—however the names of Thoreau, Emerson, and Alcott nonetheless dominate. Most of the Harmony avenue names and city companies are named after Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau (an vintage retailer named Thoreauly Antiques being certainly one of my favorites). And, when you journey barely on the outskirts of city, and sit within the fields on a heat day not too removed from the Harmony River—it’s simple to think about Thoreau rowing his canoe with a teenage Louisa Could Alcott sitting behind him whereas he’s speaking concerning the pure world.
The all-night discussions and writings of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Bronson and Louisa Could Alcott, and author Margaret Fuller (who had enraptured each Emerson and Hawthorne together with her intelligence and wonder) turned the cornerstones of Transcendentalism: the college of philosophy that emphasizes the pure world. After many years of being fed the dour strictures of the Puritan founders, putting an obedience to God above all and the shutting down of any impartial thought, a wave of liberalism rose in response. It was the person, and their relation to the pure world and their neighborhood, that was mentioned and debated.
Emerson was the neighborhood organizer of those writers and philosophers. The tenets of recent day feminism and the atmosphere started in Harmony.
Emerson was raised in Boston however a lot most well-liked Harmony for its small city village really feel. Emerson was sure Harmony was much more conducive to important and unique thought—the gap from Cambridge and Boston saved the Harmony transcendentalists away from the restrictions and repressions of the established (and shut minded) intellectuals.
Emerson and Thoreau positioned their rules into motion with their participation within the Underground Railroad, helping within the transportation of slaves from the south to security within the north. These Harmony writers advocated for the Abolitionist trigger and had been significantly distraught over the seize and execution of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. The wealthier Harmony residents had given cash to John Brown for his raid on Harper’s Ferry, satisfied that Brown’s trigger was above the regulation.
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After the disastrous failure of Brown’s raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry and main as much as his execution on December 2, 1859, Thoreau, Alcott, and Emerson strongly advocated for Brown’s launch. On the day Brown was executed, the bells of Harmony rang out.
Guests to Harmony can go to the houses of Alcott and Emerson and Hawthorne. Thoreau’s house is at Harmony’s Walden Pond, the place the place Thoreau went to stay intentionally and away from the materialism of the artifical world.
Ultimate resting place of Henry David Thoreau at Sleepy Hole Cemetery (picture by writer)
While you go to Harmony, a visit to Walden Pond is a necessity. Additionally, try Orchard Home, the place Louisa Could Alcott penned Little Ladies in a tiny upstairs bed room. The Previous Manse, owned by Emerson and occupied by Nathaniel Hawthorne, has magnificent gardens which had been designed by Thoreau as a marriage present to Hawthorne and his spouse Sophia Peabody. Emerson’s home is open for guests, and the Harmony Museum has a reproduction of Emerson’s front room and a lot of the relics of Thoreau’s Walden Pond experiment.
There may be additionally Sleepy Hole Cemetery, the ultimate resting place of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts. On a cool autumnal late afternoon, I went to Sleepy Hole and was glad to see that the graves of those super thinkers had been all pretty shut to at least one one other. A great way to maintain the dialog going.
