Each day as I commute from
Newton to Lowell, I stay almost completely within Middlesex County. I urge
all visitors to my website to consider visiting the historic and scenic sites
within the county. Please start with the two newly named sites on the list of
1,000 Special Places in Massachusetts. Although it’s listed under Needham,
Hemlock Gorge where Echo Bridge spans the Charles River is clearly a part of
Newton as well. For more information, see the section of my website on
Hemlock Gorge or go directly to the Friends of Hemlock Gorge website (www.hemlockgorge.org).
The Jackson Homestead is also described elsewhere on my website along with the
historic Burying Grounds of the city. I am proud that I worked with the
Homestead staff and Representative Barney Frank to get it listed on the
Underground Railroad Itinerary of the National Park Service.
Also visit Mary Immaculate
of Lourdes Roman Catholic Church at 270 Elliot Street in Upper Falls. It is
notable for its Romanesque architecture that echoes Wartburg Castle in Germany
including its tower visible for miles around. It features Stained Glass
Windows by the F.X. Zettler Studio of Munich, Germany. Many are based on
paintings by Raphael, Michelangelo, and other Renaissance masters. Gonippo
Raggi, known as the Michelangelo of North America, did the interior murals as
he did for more than 100 other churches in the Americas and Europe.
Hemlock Gorge and Mary
Immaculate of Lourdes are both included in the Newton Upper Falls Historic
District.
The rest of the County can be grouped by themes of Revolutionary Middlesex County: Political Revolution, Literary Revolution, and Industrial Revolution.
The battle of Lexington and
Concord ignited the American Revolution. “The shot heard round the world”
commemorated by County resident Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in “The Midnight
Ride of Paul Revere” was fired at Lexington Battle Green. At the North Bridge
over the Concord River in Concord, Minute Men from “every Middlesex Village
and farm” forced the British Regulars back to Boston and harassed them along
the Battle Road back through Concord, Lexington, and even Menotomy (present
day Arlington)
Minute Man National Park and
the Lexington Battle Green should be recognized as a World Heritage Site.
George Washington used the
Longfellow House in Cambridge as his headquarters after he assumed command of
the Continental Army. He finally forced the British Army to evacuate Boston
by sending General Henry Knox to retrieve captured British guns from Fort
Ticonderoga in New York State and haul them through the snow and ice of winter
the length of Massachusetts including many communities in Middlesex County.
This route through both states deserves to be named the Henry Knox National
Historic Trail,
In a final startling piece of military engineering, the cannons were installed virtually over night on what is now the Dorchester Heights National Historic Site overlooking the occupied city and leaving the British no choice but to evacuate the city on what’s still known as Evacuation Day,
Concord was the focus of the
American Literary Revolution of the 19th Century. After living for
a while in Newton where he preached at the Methodist Church on Winter Street
in Upper Falls (now a Buddhist Temple) and then dined at Sunnyside, the home
of Upper Falls industrialist Otis Pettee which is now the Stone Institute
across Elliot Street from Mary Immaculate of Lourdes Church, Ralph Waldo
Emerson moved to Concord and became the leader of the Transcendentalist
Literary/Philosophical Movement. He lived in the Old Manse and (of course) in
the Emerson House, which are both still literary museums as is the Orchard
House where Bronson Alcott raised his family. His daughter Louisa May Alcott
based her masterpieces “Little Women” and “Little Men” on their family life in
Concord.
Emerson’s contemporary Henry
David Thoreau wrote his seminal environmental work “Walden” based on his time
spent in a cabin at Walden Pond in Concord. His “Civil Disobedience” also
written in Concord inspired Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King in their
efforts to win independence for the nation of India and Civil Rights for
Americans of African Ancestry respectively. When Thoreau was thrown in the
Concord jail for refusing to pay his taxes in protest against the
Mexican-American War, Emerson supposedly visited him and asked “Henry, what
are you doing in there?” Thoreau supposedly rebuked him by asking “Ralph,
what are you doing out there?”
Nathaniel Hawthorne achieved
most of his fame writing in Salem about Salemesque themes, but he and his wife
lived in the Old Manse in Concord while he wrote “The Blithedale Romance”, a
novel based on the Transcendentalists who lived for a while on the West
Roxbury/Oak Hill Park border in Newton.
Though Edgar Allen Poe’s
literary heritage is hotly disputed between his birthplace in Boston (“The
Cask of the Amontillado” is based on a story he heard in Boston) and his two
major homes in Richmond and Baltimore. However, at the height of his career,
he lectured in Lowell where he supposedly fell in love and wrote his poem “The
Bells”. An old Lowell bar the “Old Worthen” commemorates his alleged visits
with a raven on its signs. He also waged a blazing literary feud with
Longfellow and other established literary figures from Concord and Boston.
Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott,
Hawthorne and their contemporaries created the first distinctly American
literature and philosophy in Middlesex County in the 19th Century.
Jack Kerouac of Lowell brought a new literary consciousness to the American
Scene that reverberates to this day in the work of a variety of later
writers. A park in downtown Lowell commemorates his writings. Fans still
visit his grave in Edson Cemetery with its remembrance “Tio (little) Jack; he
honored life.” Others trace his steps through his old neighborhood on the
north side of the Merrimack River that he documented in his Lowell novels.
His best known work is probably “On the Road” telling of his travels across
the U.S.A. with his literary friends including Allen Ginzberg, the author of
the poem “Howl”. Kerouac wrote it in a creative frenzy on a single role of
typing paper that still visits Lowell occasionally. (Another controversial
literary figure Truman Capote of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “In Cold Blood”
fame dismissed “On the Road” as “typing, not writing”, but Capote and Kerouac
subsequently made up.)
His health broken by hard living (he drank at the Old Worthen too), Kerouac returned to Lowell for his declining years before his death in his forties. His fame has grown since his death and many writers have acknowledged him as a direct or indirect inspiration.
Just as the residents of
Middlesex County helped to invent a new country and new literature, they also
invented new industries. Scattered mills across the county used the power of
the Charles, Merrimack, Concord Rivers and their tributaries to turn wheels
that turned agricultural products into food for the hungry masses and
primitive industrial goods. The site of the Mill Falls complex on the Charles
River in Newton Upper Falls has been in commercial use since 1634. But the
birth of the American Industrial Revolution can probably best be seen in the
Charles River Museum of Industry in Waltham where Francis Lowell and other
industrialists first put to work the principles Lowell had observed in his
tours of British factories. The factory owners forbid note-taking or
sketching, but Lowell returned to his quarters to record his observations that
he put into action first in Waltham and later in the city named for him where
he and his friends developed their ideas on a grand scale and with high
ideals. The poet William Blake denounced the British mills as “Satanic”, and
the great novelist Charles Dickens documented the pitiful state of British
mill workers in many of his books including but not limited to "David
Copperfield", "A Christmas Carol"., and "Hard Times" The Lowell
industrialists were determined to be different. They wanted to create places
of business where Yankee farm girls could earn an honest living without the
degradations of the British mills and even improve their minds at the Lyceums
sponsored by their masters who even built churches for their workers as well
as themselves. For a while, it worked. The pre-War Lowell mills were one of
the wonders of the world attracting visitors from across the country including
upward bound Abraham Lincoln of Illinois and Dickens himself who marveled the
beauty of the “miles of mills” in Lowell and the good condition of their
workers. Eventually, the cutthroat competition of the slave labor in the
American South and the virtual slave wages of the southern mills after the
Civil War made it impossible for the Lowell leaders to compete and maintain
their high labor standards. Irish, French, and Greek immigrants among
eventually supplanted the Yankee farm girls and found less competitive wages
than their predecessors but still more than they could make in the starving
Ireland of the Famine of the 1850’s and the other privations of Europe.
Immigrants came and worked often in very difficult conditions so that their
children and grandchildren could do better. Senator Paul Tsongas of Lowell is
perhaps the archetype of these successors. As a City Councillor, County
Commissioner, Member of Congress, and United State Senators, he tirelessly
pushed the establishment of the Lowell National Historic Park. This idea of
former Superintendent of Schools Paul Mogan is now a living reality that
thousands of tourists visit each year.
My more than thirty-five years in Lowell have also taught me in great depth how historic preservation can be a tool of civil revitalization. In my support for the Newton Upper Falls, Chestnut Hill, Auburndale, and Nortonville Historic districts, the revitalization of Hemlock Gorge, the sponsorship and amendment of Newton’s Demolition Delay Ordinance, Historic Preservation of City Hall, the Jackson Homestead, and the Burying Grounds, the image of Lowell has been at the back of my mind. You can read the details of these programs elsewhere in this site. You can be inspired by visiting Lowell.
This page last updated on Thursday, 02 September 2010
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