34. Hosmer Photograph of the Town House Area, ca. 1885-1895

Alfred Winslow Hosmer (1851-1903), a clerk and storekeeper in Concord, was also a photographer, a naturalist, and an early promoter of the life and writings of Henry David Thoreau. He photographed the people, buildings, and landscape of Concord - Thoreau-related subjects in particular - and kept detailed records of natural phenomena. The Concord Free Public Library owns about eight hundred of Hosmer's glass plate negatives, his botanical manuscripts and Thoreau correspondence, and his personal library of books by and about Thoreau.

This Hosmer cabinet card photograph - similar in perspective to the 1839/40 Barber engraving - shows the Town House, the so - called "Whipping Post Elm," the Catholic church (now Holy Family, formerly St. Bernard's), the Wright Tavern across the square, and, in the distance, at the corner of Lexington Road and the Church Green, one of several tenement houses that once formed part of the Concord Center landscape.