The Old Manse

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The Old Manse
National Register of Historic Places
National Historic Landmark
Exterior view of the building

Exterior view of the building

The Old Manse (Massachusetts)
Paris plan pointer b jms.svg
location Monument Street, Concord , Massachusetts
Coordinates 42 ° 28 '15.3 "  N , 71 ° 20' 56.2"  W Coordinates: 42 ° 28 '15.3 "  N , 71 ° 20' 56.2"  W.
Built 1769
Architectural style Georgian architecture
NRHP number [1] 66000775
Data
The NRHP added October 15, 1966
Declared as an  NHL December 29, 1962

The house built around 1769 for the patriot and pastor William Emerson is known as The Old Manse (officially Old Manse , German  Das alten Pfarrhaus ), which became the center of political, literary and social revolutions in the following hundred years. It is located on the Monument Street in Concord in the state of Massachusetts of the United States .

The building is in close proximity to the Old North Bridge , where on April 19, 1775, in the United States today as Patriots' Day is celebrated, the War of Independence of the United States began. In the middle of the 19th century, leading transcendentalists like Bronson Alcott , Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller met here regularly to discuss current events. Today it is operated as a museum by the organization The Trustees of Reservations .

General

Old Manse is located in the center of a total of 6.71  acres (2.7  hectares ) that extends east to west from Monument Street to the banks of the Concord River . In the north it is bordered by the road that leads directly to the North Bridge, in the south it joins an open space that is part of the Minute Man National Historical Park .

The vegetable garden , which is now fully restored, was originally planted by Henry David Thoreau as a wedding gift for Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife. The property is part of the Bay Circuit Trail .

history

The outwardly rather inconspicuous, former rectory is of great historical importance due to its close connection with the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne . He and his wife Sophia Peabody moved into the house immediately after their wedding in July 1842. Hawthorne recorded the three and a half years that they spent there in his American Notebooks and in his essay The Old Manse , in which he still owns the house today used names there. He also wrote most of the stories from his book Mosses From an Old Manse there .

The house was originally built around 1769 for Reverend William Emerson , who at the time was pastor in Concord (now First Parish Church ) and at the same time chaplain of the Continental Army at Fort Ticonderoga . His grandson Ralph Waldo Emerson visited the house very often as a child and lived there briefly in 1834 while he was writing on his work Nature , published in 1836 . After William Emerson's death on October 20, 1776, his widow married Reverend Ezra Ripley in 1780 , who had succeeded him in the Concord Church. She continued to live with him at Old Manse and they had three children together.

After Ripley's death, his son Samuel rented the furnished house to Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife from 1842 to 1846. After Hawthorne moved out, Samuel Ripley returned to his parents' house with his wife and youngest children, where he died the following year. His widow lived there until her own death. She was well educated and tutored Harvard students in French , German , Italian , Greek and Latin , as well as mathematics . During this time, the Old Manse became the center of Concord's literary life. Until the Trustees of Reservations acquired the building and most of the interior furnishings in 1939, it was entirely privately owned by the descendants of Samuel Ripley. Today it is operated as a museum and is open to the public.

architecture

Fireplace room

The building has only changed marginally since its construction (around 1769). It has one and a half floors and consists of wooden inverted formwork that sits on a flat stone foundation. The mansard roof two break fireplaces . The two-sash vertical sliding windows are each framed by a modeled lintel and ribbed shutters . The entrances are on the east, south and west sides, with the east being the front of the house. The entrances are roofed by triangular ornamental gables , and pilasters flank the entrances on the east and south sides.

On the back of the house, the two southern bays form a bridge to a one-storey extension with a gable roof, which is set at right angles and to which a shed - also with a gable roof - was built on the south side . The dormer window on the front and the bay window on the southeast corner of the house were added around 1880.

The interior of the house follows the typical structure around a central entrance hall. On the first floor there is a formal reception room and the dining room on the north side, to the south of the hall there is another, smaller reception room and the kitchen. A second kitchen was placed in the extension for the summer months. Upstairs are three bedrooms and a study in the northwest corner, which both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne used extensively.

All rooms are paneled. The French wallpapers in the small reception room as well as in other places date from the years before 1850. Most of the window glass is still in its original condition; some of the disks have inscriptions carved by Hawthorne and his wife with their diamond ring.

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ National Register Information System . In: National Register of Historic Places . National Park Service . Retrieved January 23, 2007.
  2. ↑ Listing of National Historic Landmarks by State: Massachusetts. National Park Service , accessed August 12, 2019.
  3. ↑ a b c Rettig, p. 2
  4. ↑ About The Old Manse. The Trustees of Reservations , accessed April 21, 2014 .
  5. ↑ a b Rettig, p. 3
  6. ↑ Rettig, p. 5

Web links

Commons : The Old Manse  - collection of images, videos and audio files