October Farm
Concord Enterprise, October 14, 1937
Joseph Barrett married Rebecca Minot in 1701. They lived with Deacon Humphrey Barrett near town on Monument Street . . . Their son John married Lois Brooks in 1744 and probably moved to this new house at that time.
His son, John Jr., born in 1748, married Experience Ball in 1780; their son, Joel born in 1789, married Sarah Russell Wyman of Cambridge in 1821 and had a son John, born in 1826.
This last John ran the farm and took care of the cows but was very fond of dancing and appeared in town on every occasion. In spite of his eagerness, he was not popular with the ladies because of the unmistakable odor of the cow barn which clung to his clothes. When Governor Robinson led the ball at the celebration of the town’s 250th Birthday in 1885, it caused no little satisfaction to his political opponents when John Barrett danced with the Governor’s lady.
William Brewster (1851-1919) was a distinguished ornithologist. He made the most complete collection of birds in North America. He bought the farm about 1891 with 300 acres nearby. Many of the observations recorded in his notebooks were made on this farm and along the river. October Farm is the name of a beautiful collection of such observations, published in 1936. Another book, Concord River, was published by the Harvard University Press in 1937, copyrighted “by the president and fellows of Harvard College” and released to the public in September. These two books, which are both compilations of excerpts from the diary of William Brewster containing his nature observations in somewhat similar form to Thoreau’s Journal but with the emphasis on birds, have attracted (and still are attracting at the time of the writing) more than nation-wide attention on the part of ornithologists and the public in general to “October Farm” [now 1360 Monument Street] as the home of William Brewster.