50. Alfred Munroe (Concord). Peter Anderson, ca. 1895. From a glass plate negative, presented by Henry Francis Smith.

Peter Anderson (or Andersen) came to Concord from Jyllan, Denmark. He worked here as a railroad gateman and a laborer. Anderson lived behind the depot, in the present 42/44 Elsinore Street, in an area populated by Irish, Italians, and Scandinavians. His son Jens—whose first wife was Helen Beckvold (see #33)—also worked for the railroad and lived in his father's Elsinore Street home. Jens became minister of the Norwegian Danish Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1890s. Peter Anderson, too, was involved in the church, as treasurer. Widowed in 1895, Peter left Concord during the first decade of the 20th century. He died in 1915, at eighty, in Westborough, Massachusetts.

Alfred Munroe (see #48) took this photograph when Peter Anderson was about sixty. Munroe caught the man's dignified humility. Moreover, however unprepossessing Anderson's appearance, the upturning and illumination of his face suggest a certain transcendent spirituality.