This morning we left the RV behind and drove north to Lexington, Massachusetts, home of Minute Man National Historical Park, which interprets the people, places, and events surrounding the American Revolutionary War’s Battles of Lexington and Concord.  The parking lot is a ten minute walk from the visitor center:

At the Battle Road visitor center, the kids picked up their Junior Ranger workbooks:

We walked over to the Jacob Whittemore house.  Whittemore evacuated his pregnant wife and children from the house as the fighting along what would late be known as Battle Road passed right by his house:

Trish and the kids participated in a reenactment of colonial militia training:

The ranger demonstrated the firing of his Musket:

We spoke to the two other rangers in the house about colonial life:

Back at the visitor center, the kids handed in their workbooks and received their Junior Ranger badges:

On the way to the North Bridge unit of the park, we stopped by The Wayside, owned at different times by Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Harriet Mulford Stone:

Our next stop was Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau wrote his most famous work in a cabin built on land owned by his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson.  We set out to find the cabin site:

The cabin was torn down shortly after Thoreau’s two-year experiment in simple living was over in 1847.  The cabin roof was used as the roof of a local pig sty, and the rest of the wood used as scrap.  In 1945, amateur archaeologist Roland Wells Robbins (yes, the same Roland Wells Robbins who identified the location of the Saugus Iron Works) identified the location of Thoreau’s cabin:

Since well before the discovery of the cabin location, Thoreau fans would come to this nearby location and leave a stone where the cabin was thought to have stood.  The pile is now quite large:

Many of the stones have engraved or written words on them, ranging from the profound to the mundane:

Walden Pond:

After hiking around Walden Pond, we arrived at the North Bridge unit of Minute Man National Historical Park, site of the bridge where Colonial Militia members, English subjects, first fired upon the King’s Army, starting the Revolutionary War.  Emerson’s poem would later describe this as the location of the “shot heard round the world”:

 

The recreated bridge:

The British soldiers had set out from Boston to Concord to recover four cannons stolen and hidden by militia members at a local farm.  This is one of the four canons, known as “The Hancock”:

We left Minute Man NHP and drove north to Lowell, Massachusetts, home of Lowell National Historical Park, which interprets the rise and fall of Lowell as America’s first Company town and center of American textile production.  Most of the buildings in Lowell are former textile mills.  These buildings are now apartments and art studios:

This building is missing its roof:

We walked over to the visitor center, where the kids completed their Junior Ranger workbooks and received their badges:

We walked over to the Mill Girl’s Boardinghouse, where rural farm women lived while working in the mills.  The mills created one of the first opportunities for women to work independently outside of a farm setting:

Mill girls were later replaced by immigrants willing to work for lower wages.  The boarding house included displays on modern immigrants:

We passed many more factory buildings on the way back to the car:

We’ve enjoyed learning about US history through the nine NPS sites we’ve visited over the last few days.  Only two more to go!