North of Boston - Of Witches and Revolutions

The heater was on most of the night in the RV, as temperatures plunged into the 30s in New England. We spent the last two days at the Minuteman RV Park in Littleton, MA, approximately 25 miles northwest of Boston.

Sunday afternoon, after getting the trailer set up in the new campground, Brian drove us to Salem to visit the Witch Museum. While the facility is old and doesn’t take advantage of current audio visual equipment or computer animation, it provides a good historical account of the hysteria around witches in early New England. Ann Putnam and a group of teenage girls, bored and looking for some excitement, convinced most of the town that they were being controlled by witches. Unfortunately their accusations led to the hanging of 19 innocent people, and hundreds of others going to jail. Another man was crushed to death by stones. The museum makes a interesting case for the repetition of this pattern of hysteria throughout history – the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, McCarthyism, and perhaps even our current financial crisis.

From Salem we headed north to the Philips Academy at Andover. Recognized as one of the best prep schools in America, Andover sits on a beautiful college-like campus, offering its 1200 students a rigorous academic experience. Peter Schock, a family friend from Portland, graduated from Andover last year. Brian’s friend Rona, who attended middle school with him at Meadow Park, is in her sophomore year at Andover. She was an excellent tour guide on a crisp autumn afternoon. After touring the campus, we walked into downtown Andover and enjoyed brick oven pizza for dinner at Bertucci’s, which was recommended by several friends from Boston. It was excellent!

Monday morning the kids did homework, then we drove to a UPS store and sent in a portfolio for one of Laura’s classes. The rest of the day was spent exploring the events leading up to the Revolutionary War, and many of the authors and poets who wrote about it. We started at the North Bridge in Concord, where on April 19, 1775, the Minutemen first fired on His Majesty’s redcoats. It was surreal, standing on this graceful bridge, watching the river meander slowly underneath, trying to imagine what it must have been like that chaotic day. Nobody knows who fired the first shot, but the event changed the course of history.

We retraced the events of April 19th, driving to Lexington where the redcoats had killed several colonists earlier that day, and later were engaged in fierce fighting as they retreated all the way back to Boston. Along the way we viewed the spot by the river where Paul Revere was captured and detained the night before as he alerted the colonists that the “British were coming”. The visitor center in Lexington had an excellent half hour presentation recasting the events of that fateful day.

The Lexington and Concord areas also contain the homes of many famous American writers and poets. We drove past Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home, and enjoyed reading his Concord Hymn about the “shot heard round the world”. We stopped and walked around Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, made famous by her book “Little Women”. In Concord we made a stop at Walden Pond, and viewed a replica of Henry David Thoreau’s house, at 10 x 12, no bigger than the size of today’s’ bedrooms! Teressa and the kids had fun “playing” with Thoreau’s statue (see the attached pictures). We feel humbled walking in the shadows of legends!