About: Three Centuries of the John Ball House

Concord Art Association is curretly preparing a full Historic Structures Report on the occupants and uses of this house through three centuries. As soon as the report is completed it wiljohn_ball_housel be posted to this page. Meanwhile, please enjoy this excellent history adapted by Sally Chapin.

The John Ball House was built on the house lot bought by Thomas Dane in 1657 from Reverend Peter Bulkeley, a large landholder and the most influential man in early Concord. Bulkeley set out for this country after he was silenced by the Archbishop in England for his non-conformist ministry. He was then fifty years old, and from his comfortable English vicarage he seems to have anticipated his needs in the wilderness for a house and library [which was considerable] and a church. With him and his wife, when they set sail from England in May of 1635, was Thomas Dane, 32, a carpenter. His will attests to his religious conviction.

I commit my Soul to God yt gave it to mee,
hoping and believeing in Jesus Cht my
only Savior, that he will receive my Soul
into the Armes of his mercy, and raise my
body to Eternall glory at the resurrection. . . .

The short sides of Dane’s rectangular house lot are bordered on the north and south by two of Concord’s natural formations–the ridge and the mill brook which runs roughly parallel to each other from west to east through the town. They approach one another where the brook was dammed in the early years of the town to turn the gristmill. Here, the overflowing water formed a millpond whose northern edge came within one hundred fifty yards of the ridge. Between this ridge to the north and the brook some two hundred yards to the south, the town laid out a “Straite street” curving in consonance with the ridge along which the first house lots were granted. Concord fathers were proud of this road and referred to it as “the highway under the hill through the Towne.” Early house lots ran from the ridge across the road and down to the brook where the barns were raised.

Thomas Dane was not the first settler to build on the land he purchased in 1657. According to the deed, Rev. Bulkeley, “ . . . sold to Thomas Dane, Carpenter of Concord, all that house, barns, and land which I bought of George Haywood ¹, together with the orchard also abutting on the Mill brook . . . “ Dane may have altered the house or built another on this land which he owned until his death in 1675.

Dane left his “dwelling house, barns, and orchard” to his son, Joseph who probably sold it since by 1692 the land had passed out of the Dane family and had not yet become identified with the name of any new owner.

The first certain record of the property in the eighteenth century is in 1723 when William Clark sold it to John Ball [b. 1691]. The deed described the purchase as “. . . a tract of land near the meeting house . . . containing seven acres . . . six acres that are above the countrey road [Lexington Road] . . . and the other acre that lyes below the countrey road . . . with all the Buildings.” In 1761, Ball built a new house next to the old house and this new house, now the Concord Art Center.

The John Ball house was owned by Capt. Joseph Butler at the time of the revolution. The Provincial Congress met in the church across the street and ordered supplies to be brought from nearby town and stored in Concord. General Gage in Boston learned where the hiding places were and gave instructions to Lt. Col. Smith to lead an expedition to destroy the stores. Since Capt. Butler is named in these instructions, it is presumed that he stored goods in his house. The enormous cellar was undoubtedly handy for Butler’s purposes, but if it were too obvious a hiding place, he may have used the cave in the retaining wall behind the house. This cave was one of several built into the base of the ridge.

About 1810, the house was owned by Jonas Lee, a leader of the Democrats in the first years of the nation and several times elected to the Legislature. Lee built the addition on the east side of the house and during its construction he and his fourth wife quarreled over the position of the chimney.

The house was subsequently occupied by Charles B. Davis who kept a store [including the post office] next door. Thoreau mentions Davis in his Journals chiefly in connection with the great elm in from of Davis’ house. The tree was to be cut down because “Davis and the neighbors were much alarmed by the creaking in the late storms, for fear it would fall on their roofs. It stands two or three feet into Davis’s yard” ³ “Four men, cutting at once, began to fell the big elm at 10 A.M., went to dinner at 12, and got through at 2:30 P.M. They used a block and tackle with five balls, fastened to the base of a buttonwood, and drawn by a horse . . . “ [See 3.125] “The tree was so sound I think it might have lived fifty years longer; but Mrs. Davis said that she would not like to spend another such a week at the last before it was cut down.” [See 3.136] Afterwards, Thoreau wrote: “I have attended the felling and, so to speak, the funeral of this old citizen of the town . . . “ [See 3.130]. Someone quietly planted another elm in place of the old tree on the east side of the Art Center. [4]

From 1849 until the end of the Civil War, Sam Staples, “Sam,” as he was universally called, owned the house. Thoreau found Sam “. . . quick, clear, downright, and on the whole a good fellow, especially good to treat with rougher and slower men than himself, always meaning well.” [5];

Sam married Lucinda Wesson, daughter of Thomas Wesson, local tavern keeper and owner of the Middlesex Hotel who disapproved of both town ministers because they preached temperance, and refused to let his daughter be married to Sam by either of them. Instead, he got Ralph Waldo Emerson to perform the ceremony in the hotel.

In the late 1860s, the house and the one next door were owned by the Joel Walcott family. A son, Charles, married here in 1868 and Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his brother: “In your Ball House young Walcott was married day before yesterday with the good wishes of all the town.”

Edward Emerson wrote in Memoirs of Members of the Social Circle in Concord [Fourth Series] “The newly married pair began their housekeeping in the large old-fashioned house on the ‘Great Road’ to Boston . . . The house, though low-studded, was very well built and homelike, snugly placed under the hill at the east corner of the Common. It had one drawback, its vis-à-vis was the ‘Yellow Block’ since removed, a tenement house well stocked with humanity of a humble class, not especially disorderly, however, and with much worthy leaven in the lump—also many children.” [6]

Charles Walcott became a lawyer and head of the Massachusetts Board of Arbitration. Under his direction it is said that this body “won official praise in Europe” and became a model for the national board in Washington. He resided all his life in Concord. He authored Concord in the Colonial Period, among other books, and was curator of the Concord Lyceum.

The Concord Art Association was formed in 1917 by Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts [1871-1927]. Prior to that time art exhibitions were held in the Town House. The second exhibition of oil paintings, drawings, etchings, and bookplates, [ca. 160 items] contained works by local artists most of whom were already familiar to the area. In 1919 [the fourth annual exhibition], the Association displayed works of John Singer Sargent, Daniel Chester French [“The Spirit of Life”], Anna Vaughn Hyatt, Robert Henri, Joseph Pennell, Childe Hassam, Edward W. Redfield and Frank Bragwyn; also Mary Cassatt’s new etching “Child Seated,” Elizabeth Shippen Green Elliott’s five drawings for Kipling’s “The Knife and the Chalk,” “Brooklyn Bridge,” by Sears Gallagher, and others, provoking the newspaper to comment that “the exhibit honors the Association and the town, and would be an event in Boston.” More than one thousand people attended the exhibition.

The following year the newspaper reporter commented that “from small beginnings and through all the difficulties of war time, the annual exhibition of the Concord Art Association has steadily grown in importance until it has come to be recognized as an event in the art world, a show which artists compete to enter, and which people come long distances to see.” The quality of the works displayed, the reporter continued, “is fully up to the standard of the best exhibitions in Boston, New York, Philadelphia or Pittsburg.”

The last show in the Town House included Daniel Chester French’s “Lincoln,” designed for Lincoln, Nebraska, displaying a “supreme dignity of pose and the wonderful technique manifested in its execution.” Prize winners were Charles W. Hawthorne [Evelyn Chambers portrait], Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts [“French Peasant” - pencil portrait], Charles Grafly [bust of Frank Duveneck], Margaret Foote Hawley [“Mrs. Sawtell” miniature portrait], and Joseph Pennell [eight prints]. Admission was free.

In 1923 the Association moved into the John Ball House, which Miss Roberts had bought and converted into three small galleries on the first floor, a fourth gallery which encompassed all of the second floor and which was sky-lit, and a curator’s apartment. The house, which stands in the center of Concord on Lexington Road was named the Art Center and opened for the Association’s Seventh Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture.

As before this was an impressive show. The catalog listed fifty-two paintings including works by George Bellows, Frank Weston Benson, Cecelia Beaux, Mary Cassatt, Arthur B. Davies, Thomas Dewing, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Rockwell Kent, Ernest Lawson, Claude Monet, and John Singer Sargent; twenty-seven pieces of sculpture by artists such as Alexander Stirling Calder, Daniel Chester French [whom Miss Roberts asked to be president of the Association], Malvina Hoffman, A. Phimister Procter, and Mahonri Young; Seventy-one paintings by members of the American Society of Miniature painters; and in addition to the cataloged work, the newspapers mentioned drawings by Auguste Rodin and water colors by Winslow Homer.

Miss Roberts also attended to details. Thomas Todd of Boston designed the exhibition catalogues–heavy white paper, sewn in signatures and bound between blue covers. Mrs. Renfrew’s orchestra probably furnished music at the opening as it had the previous year. [7] Five thousand three hundred visitors saw the exhibition.

Instead of commenting on the show itself this year, the newspapers wrote mainly about the colonial house that the Art Association had acquired. Despite the changes [including steel reinforcement] a critic wrote: “The first impression is one of surprise for the house built in 1750 seems to have been unaltered in line, and one wonders where the pictures have been hung. The house is of special interest. It now appears as it did when built except for an addition in the 1810’s to the east side. Since the addition is recessed it does not spoil the line of the original plan of the house.”

The building, termed a “colonial mansion” is essentially a large, square house with a central chimney opening into a fireplace in each room. Originally, it was a two-family house with east and west halves. A front door and vestibule existed in 1825 when Lafayette came to visit the North Bridge in Concord. In this vestibule with its “tiny panes of glass, of curious blue and rose tints,” a Concord girl waited before going across the street to the First Parish Church to present a bouquet of flowers to the French general. [8]

In making over the Ball House, the low-ceilinged downstairs rooms were unchanged and “the slightly old woodwork has been carefully preserved . . . so have the doors with their hand-wrought hinges. In unifying the upstairs into one large gallery, the central chimney was removed though the outside chimneystack remains. The attic, eliminated when the second floor gallery was installed, had been a large hall of fine proportions. In 1802 this hall was used for the meeting place of the Masonic Lodge. In altering this part of the building, painted beams of curious design came to light.”[9]

Behind the paneling to the right of the fireplace in one of the downstairs rooms is a “secret chamber,” supposed to have been used for ‘the Underground Railway,’ a previous history of the Art Center reads. “The entrance was formerly from above, through a trap door, but when the room was discovered, in 1916, some workers found it by accident while making an opening in the huge chimney. A cannon ball, a powder horn, a three-pronged fork, and some candle snuffers were in it.”

It was characteristic of Miss Roberts to hire a woman, Miss Lois L[illey] Howe [(1864-1964)], as the architect to carry out the remodeling of the Ball House. Miss Roberts thought that men dominated the arts as well as the professions, and as it happened her carpenter confirmed her opinion. “You don’t get me to work with no woman architect,” he said. Miss Howe, however, won him over, and a reporter wrote: “the carpenter has decided that architecture is quite a proper profession for a woman, after all.”

The annual exhibitions were held in the large upstairs gallery. At other times Miss Roberts’ mural-sized canvas of the Concord Civil War veterans hung there along with the paintings she acquired and donated to the Art Association’s permanent collection. These included oil paintings by John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, William Jennys, Fortuny Calvo, Antonio Mancini, and Thomas Sully, and about one hundred etchings including prints by Mary Cassatt, Whistler, Rembrandt, Millet, and others. Two of the first floor rooms were used for Miss Roberts’ family antiques, also part of the permanent collection. In these rooms were installed “Meissen china dated 1710; Chinese, French, Venetian and Austrian porcelain and glass; a cup and saucer made for Napoleon III bearing medallions in gold of himself and his empress; a medieval mace; old Italian musical instruments; a French hunting-horn; a revolutionary sword; the ornate staff of gondolier; a marriage crown worn by a Norwegian bride; a great carved eagle which held a light in some old Flemish cathedral; Egyptian curios; winged scarab and mummy necklaces from Thebes; specimens of Syrian glass dating from the first, second, and fourth centuries before Christ and found at Tiberius near the lake of Galilee, Beisan, Mount Carmel, Tyre, near Nazareth, Haifa, and at Fik Hauran; an old Venetian parchment with tooled leather binding presented to the son of Titian in 1612 by the bishop of Padua with his own seal appended–conferring upon him the degree of Doctor of law; a miniature on ivory by Edward Malbone. Necessarily, everything has been removed or sold through the years to meet expenses of the Art Center.

Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts was born in Philadelphia in 1871. Her Father’s father typified the family themes of ambition, success and public service. He made a fortune in anthracite coal, became director of the first railroad in this country, encouraged the subscription of bonds to establish the Pennsylvania Railroad Corporation, and organized a committee in favor of extending a railroad to the Pacific. He was a board member of the Franklin Institute and Girard Collection and corresponded with John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. In Elizabeth’s own lifetime an uncle was president of a national iron and steel plant, and a cousin was president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. By American standards, the family fortune was already old when her father was born.

Elizabeth’s mother wanted Elizabeth [known as Elsie], her only child, to curl her hair, dress in a feminine, ribbons and frills style and go to parties. By the time she was fifteen, however, Elsie had identified her own ambition. She wanted to paint.

She began to study with H. R. Poore and Elizabeth Bonsal in Philadelphia. She entered a painting in an exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and won the Smith Prize given to a woman for work showing, “the most originality of subject, beauty of design and drawing, fineness of color, and skill of execution.” Thereafter Elsie went to Paris and entered the Julian Academy. Her classes were given in its “feminine division,” a segregation that was particularly irksome to Elsie Roberts. She was formal and reserved, tumultuous inside, ready to counter sex discrimination with bitterness and the retort “I can paint as well as any man.”

Elsie stayed in Paris for eight years. Her teachers were Robert Fleury, [Jules] Lefebvre, Merson and one Monsieur Beaugereau, putatively the most famous man of his day in Paris. In 1898, after two more years of study in Florence, Elsie returned home. She was too old for furbelow parties. When her mother died two years later, Elsie endowed a prize in landscape painting at the Philadelphia Academy in her memory.

Miss Roberts lived in the family apartment in New York, but it was likely in Hopkinton, New Hampshire [her mother’s family summer home] that she met Grace Keyes, who would become her beloved companion and heir. A sportswoman, Grace played golf and tennis and enjoyed fishing. She was the Massachusetts women’s golf champion in 1900 and later president of its Association, but her career ended after a botched appendectomy.

“Miss Grace” as people called her, is said to have been witty, outgoing, outspoken, and, at times, abrupt. Dressed in English tweeds and sensible shoes, she ran the house, gardened, organized Elsie’s painting time, and planned their trips. In the best years, they traveled to the Azores, Portugal and Spain where they were befriended by Princess Isabella de Bourbon who later wrote and sent them a large inscribed photograph. They went down the Nile, owned a houseboat that other people called a “yacht” and cruised around the New England coast. They spent summers not only in New Hampshire but also in Annisquam, on the Massachusetts North Shore, where they had a house and where Elsie painted the open beach for which she is best known. “She was quite an artists,” a painter who knew her said, “and she didn’t paint delicate flowers either. She painted like a man, slap, dab, well you know, like Sargent, fast, large and it’s done!’

During the First World War, Elsie wanted to help the French cause and intended to join the Red Cross but failed the physical tests. Thereafter she painted oil sketches of Concord women sewing for soldiers overseas. The proceeds from the sale of these and other paintings sold during the war years amounted to $10,000 that she used to buy a field ambulance for use at the front in France. [10]

Elsie had studied and painted with great seriousness and ambition. She had exhibited in Paris, in various cities in this country, but never in major galleries and except for the war works paintings she seldom sold her work; reviews tended to be polite and superficial; she was not accepted in to the Copley Society in Boston; the picture accepted for an international exhibition was cancelled. The absence of recognition equal to that of the well-known painters of the time was disheartening.

When she was twenty-eight she wrote to the director of the Pennsylvania Academy telling him that she would not send a picture to its next annual Exhibition. “It is because my picture ‘The Madonnas of St. Mark’s’ was so very badly hung.”

Grace, of course, knew her anguish and may have encouraged Elsie to create the Art Association so she could hang her work on the same walls with those she regarded as peers. “We should exchange views with artists all over the country,” she said in an interview. She financed and managed the Association, and the exhibitions, held annually for ten years, were spectacular.

An illness in 1925 forced Miss Roberts to undergo surgery. Thereafter the doctor told her not to work. “If only he would let me paint,” Elsie often said. “I remember,” a niece of Grace’s recalls, “seeing her go around, all sallow and bent, with her nurse.” Late the next year she was readmitted to the Massachusetts General Hospital for “psychoneurosis.” In early 1927, on the same day her father died nineteen years earlier, she hung herself.

Grace lived until 1950. At her death Elsie’s estate passed to the Boston Children’s Aid Society.

The Sunday Herald, Boston, April 29, 1923. “Literary Concord’s progress toward becoming one of the art capitals of America has been advanced by the opening of the Concord Art Center at 15 Lexington Road. This house, with its art galleries, is favorably situated to draw attendance and public support. The thousands of people, to be sure, who visit Concord every summer do not go there to see modern art. They are interested in the Old North Bridge, the Old Manse, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Lake Walden, and the houses in which the Alcotts, the Emersons and the Hawthornes once lived. They like to take away souvenirs of the golden age of New England literature. Still, if there is an art Center, right on the main street, with a picturesque swinging sign in front and with the hospitable door wide open, then the oil magnate from Oklahoma and the preceptress of a girls’ school in Alabama will alike be attracted to step in and see the pictures and sculptures. If an occasional sale of a work of art is negotiated, that is so much to the good of the artistic producers as well as the [patrons?] of the Concord Art Association.

In 1924 the eighth annual exhibition include the Zuloaga portrait of Antonia la Gallega which “has much of the same somber beauty that El Greco and Rivera disclosed in their depictions of the human figure.” Additionally there was “Mr. [Chauncey F.] Ryder’s great landscape, of a vast hillside scene beyond four gaunt trees. Every patch and passage from foreground to sky has been made interesting.”

“Many of our visitors, I found in the first years of our exhibitions, have never heard of some of the foremost living artists,” Miss Roberts said to me the other day in explanation of the Association’s well-documented catalog. “Very intelligent people, informed on a variety of subjects, have often been outside of the current of art interest, and are a little dazed as they look around at a collection of paintings. That is why we have adopted a policy of issuing a catalog that tells something about each exhibitor. Two women, apparently school teachers from the Middle West, told me this morning how much more interesting the catalog had made the exhibitions to them.”

The Lowell Courier Citizen reporter, F. W. Coburn, continues: “People like to be told things. That is why lecture recitals of classic music have such vogue. That is why in art galleries if there isn’t a catalog the visitors will sometimes draw forth a newspaper clipping, to read what one of the critics has said even while surveying, and sometimes before observing, the exhibited works of art. I am somewhat of a seasoned gallery-goer, myself, but I found myself looking at the numbers in Miss Robert’s catalog almost simultaneously with my glance at the pictures.

The “House of Joan of Arc,” by Henry Ossawa Tanner, reminded Mr. Coburn “that 28-odd years ago Tanner was for a very brief period a resident of Concord, the town where his picture is now shown. He had returned to this country [from France] thinking to settle somewhere where his color would not count too heavily against his mingling as a man-among-men–with such good society as Paris had accustomed him to. By advice of a fellow artist from Boston tanner tried Concord, but he discovered that even in a Center of New England Liberalism a Negro [sic] is socially persona non grata, and he went back to Europe disgusted with this free republic.”

In 1925, the medals of honor were awarded, for sculpture, to Edward McCarten for “Diana,” to Charles W. Hawthorne for his painting “The Offering”, and to Lilian Westcott Hale for eight charcoal drawings. The exhibition contained fine sculptures by Charles Grafly, Anna Coleman Ladd, [Ivan] Mestrovic, Paul Manship, Brenda Putnam, Robert Aitken, Frederick W. Allen, Chester Beach, Harriot W. Frishmuth, Albet Laessle, Richard Recchia, Victor Salvatore and Grace Helen Talbot. Painters included Charles H. Davis, Ernest L. Blumenshein, Nicholas Fechin, Gertrude Fiske, Eric Judson, Walter Ufer, Marion Boyd Allen, Frank W. Benson, Frederick A. Bosley, John E. Costigan, Fredrick G. Hall, Marion Hawthorne, Aldro T. Hibbard, Charles Hopkinson, John C. Johanssen, Herman Dudley Murphy, Charles Hovey Pepper, Edward W. Redfield, Chauncey F. Ryder, John Sharman, Alice Ruggles Sohier, Gardner Symons, Edmund C. Tarbell, Helen M. Turner, John Whorf, and Stanley W. Woodward.

The catalog included mention of the death of Alicia M. Keyes, a prominent artist in Concord and a strong supporter of the Art Association. The tribute to her describes the objective of the Association. “The aim of the Art Center is to make available to all persons an education through the study of eminent creations in art, toward an ever more perfect understanding of the nobility of beauty in form and color. Of beauty which is holiness.

Toward the furtherance of this aim in the world Miss Keyes devoted her life and from no one of the many activities to which she gave her services is due to her memory a more grateful and lasting appreciation than from the Concord Art Association.”

In 1926, Daniel Chester French resigned from the presidency of the Association and his place was filled by Edward McCarten a Sculptor from New York. George Keyes was vice-president.

Fifteen years later there was an exhibition of something completely different: A Model Aircraft Exhibit. Six scale models were loaned by Concord high school students; twenty-five were made by Mary Ogden Abbott. Photographs were loaned by the United States Navy, the Bell Aircraft Corporation, and the following other Corporations: Brewster Aircraft, Consolidated Aircraft, Curtis-Wright, Grummen Aircraft Engineering, Lockeed Aircraft, the Republic Aviation Corporation, United Aircraft, Glenn L. Martin Company, the North American Aviation Inc., Republic Aviation Corporation, United Aircraft, the U.S. Army, Pan American Airways Systems, United Airlines, Douglas, and the U.S. Marine Corp. It was part of an effort to educate the public to recognize enemy aircraft, and, closer to home, to inform the airplane spotters on the observation tower on Nashawtuc Hill.

Through the 1940s the Art Association had small exhibitions of local artists. There were shows of designs for stained glass windows [Charles Connick], architectural drawings, Louise Stimson’s model of the Old Corner Bookstore, models and photographs of post-war housing of Konrad Wachsmann and Walter Gropius, Oriental prints, the early works of Daniel Chester French [including details from his work in Cleveland, Trinity Church in Boston, and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington], and wood carvings of Mary Ogden Abbott.

In the 1950s and 1960s the Art Association’s attention centered mainly on available local talent. What had been an elegant international enterprise was substantially reduced if not in elegance then certainly in scope. By the 1960s the Association revived. Membership increased, attendance trebled. There was a photography show of the works of William Anderson, Martin Bovey jr., Sandy Macone, and Keith Martin in 1960, the Women’s Club sponsored the Spring Exhibition in 1961. There was an eventful Art Festival, Crafts Exhibitions and a show of contemporary Native American paintings from the New Mexico Museum of Art.

To commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Association as a non-profit organization an exhibition was opened in September 1961, of the paintings of Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts and six New England artists as well as eight Association members. And in the following year there was a memorial exhibition of the paintings and etchings of Gertrude Fiske [1879-1961], a personal friend and associate of Elizabeth Roberts. Miss Fiske studied with local teachers Edmund Tarbell, Frank Benson, and Phillip Hale. Her work “followed in good measure the 19th century academic procedure, with added devices assimilated from the impressionists.” Other exhibits included a private showing of Eliot O’Hara’s watercolors, Stanley Woodward’s marine paintings and drawings, and a crafts display combining the Annual Handweaving Bazaar of the Weaver’s Guild and Fellowship Craftsmen.

The spring show, sponsored by the Concord Women’s Club included works of R. H. Ives Gammell’s Biblical works, and his student, Robert Douglas Hunter’s drawings of Cape Cod. “Memories of Antietam”, Miss Roberts’s huge [165 in. x 100 in.] oil painting received a fine statement in July, 1963 written by RRW in the Concord Journal ending with a quote from James Russel Lowell’s dialogue between Concord Bridge and Bunker Hill: “Than seek such peace as only cowards crave/ Give Me the peace of dead men, or of brave.” ¹¹

Frederick Wellsman, a watercolorist, and Hsien-Chi Tseng exhibited watercolors in the summer of 1963, and Stow Wegenroth displayed his realistically drawn birds. “Forty years of the Art of Aldro T. Hibbard” was exhibited in the fall, and later another of the successfully mounted crafts shows which raised money for the Tibetan refugee children.

At the end of the 1960s an American whose work reflects his association with Mexico, Whit Carter, had a show of his watercolors with sculpture by Mico Kaufman, a Rumanian who studied in Italy and had settled in Massachusetts.

Adapted by Sarah Chapin

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Notes

1. George Haywood’s land is listed by Ruth R. Wheeler as one of the first recorded grants in Concord.

2. “He directed the mason to build it in the side, she in the corner of the room. They argued, scolded, and raved about it till the mason got out of patience, and began laying the bricks as Mr. Lee directed. Mrs. Lee started up and kicked over the bricks as fast as laid. The mason kept on laying, the woman kicking, and Jonas swearing, till all were exhausted.” The man won.

3. Henry D. Thoreau, Journals, VIII, 117, January 19, 1856.

4. The elm tree, now old, or its offspring, and possibly the same buttonwood [sycamore] tree, are still out in front of the Art Association. Both are venerable trees worthy of the admiration that Thoreau heaped on the one destroyed in 1856.

5. Thoreau, Journals, X, 230.

6. Edward W. Emerson, Memoirs of Members of the Social Circle in Concord, [Fourth Series], 1909. “Charles Hosmer Walcott”, 215-16.

7. According to the 1922 news clipping Mrs. Renfrew’s music was “especially well selected [and] suited for the occasion.” Mrs. Renfrew and her orchestra apparently did not come from Concord as there is no record of her or her organization.

8. The Marquis de Lafayette came to Concord in September 1824 as part of his tour of the United States at the invitation of President Munroe. The Committee of Arrangements was criticized for not including ordinary Concordians in the Concord celebration.

9. Quotation source missing.

10. It’s driver was Lt. Joseph Keyes, a cousin of Grace’s, who had won the Croix de Guerre.

11. The painting is now in the Concord Town House.

This article has been adapted from a monograph [1975] by William Knight and from newspaper and scrapbook articles transcribed by Holly Larner. I acknowledge their work with admiration and gratitude. I have received generous help from Virginia McIntyre, Loring Coleman, and the staff of the Concord Art Association. My thanks to them all.

Sally Chapin