Concord's Literary Landscape & Walden Pond

The reconstructed wooden bridge over the Concord River where on April 19, 1775, colonial militiamen fired 'the shot heard round the world' and drove British Regulars back to Boston. Daniel Chester French's 1875 Minute Man statue stands at the bridge's west end; the 5.5-mile Battle Road Trail connects the North Bridge to the Lexington Green where the fighting began at dawn.

The brown clapboard house on Lexington Road where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women in 1868 — the novel was drafted in the preserved 'apple slump' room over a single summer. The house is unchanged from the Alcott era; Bronson Alcott's school for Concord's children operated in the barn. The guided tour traces the specific rooms that appear in the novel.

A Concord cafe in a 19th-century commercial building on Main Street, serving soups, sandwiches, and baked goods made from local ingredients. The cheese selection from the Concord Cheese Shop next door is available; the coffee is from a small New England roaster.

The 61-acre glacial kettle pond where Henry David Thoreau built a 10-by-15-foot house and lived from July 4, 1845 to September 6, 1847, producing the drafts of both Walden and the anti-slavery essay Civil Disobedience. The replica cabin stands near the parking area; the site of the original is marked by cairns visitors have added for 150 years. The pond is clear and swimmable; a 1.7-mile trail circles the shoreline.

Emerson's white colonial at 28 Cambridge Turnpike, where he lived from 1835 until his death in 1882, is preserved with its original furnishings. Thoreau built the cabin himself beginning in March 1845 as a deliberate experiment in voluntary simplicity, living there for two years, two months, and two days while writing what would become Walden. Emerson's library, with 1,200 volumes, is intact. The barn behind the house was the site of the Transcendentalist 'conversations' that Emerson hosted throughout the 1840s.

A Concord restaurant in a renovated 19th-century commercial building, serving New England farm-to-table cuisine with a seasonal menu driven by local farms and the Concord area's market garden tradition. The cheese plates feature New England producers; the house-made pasta and the wood-roasted chicken are the kitchen's consistent anchors.