Old Manse Will Be Preserved As a Public Shrine: Trustees of Public Reservations Raise $3,000 for “Unwanted But Beautiful Baby” Left on Our Door-Step
Concord Enterprise, March 15, 1939
Concord—Terming it “an unwanted but beautiful baby left on our door step,” the trustees of public reservations have taken an option on the famed Old Manse of Concord and are now busy raising the last $3000 which will make them its purchasers.
Famous as the house where Hawthorne wrote his Mosses from an Old Manse; where Emerson spent both youthful years and aging months, where the “prophets slept a night or two”, this old landmark adjacent to the Concord battlefield, recently described by a prominent English architect as “the most beautiful house in America,” is to be preserved as a public shrine.
Ignored by the New England hurricane, which merely blew down surrounding trees, and saved from fire some years ago, this house is permeated with reminiscences of literary, historical and, for Mrs. John W. Ames of Cambridge, homey associations.
Mrs. Ames is the direct descendant of the man to whom the house passed after it had been built by Rev. William Emerson in 1769. She is also in the cousin category, related to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In 1775, Rev. William Emerson watched the raging battle at the North Bridge from his window. Later he served in the Revolutionary War as Chaplain. He died in Walpole on his way home from Fort Ticonderoga.
Soon his widow had a boarder, the new minister, Rev. Ezra Ripley, and it was not very long before Rev. Ripley asked the hand of Widow Emerson. That created a stir among the Concord raised eyebrows, who held, with pursed lips, that such a match was unseemingly [i.e. unseemly], since Mrs. Emerson had had the minister as a boarder, and since the minister was younger than the lady of his choice.
Rev. Ripley one fine day looked his steely congregation in the eye and said, “All right, I won’t marry Mrs. Emerson, but I also will not sanction any other marriages in Concord.”
Rev. Ripley married Widow Emerson—with Concord’s blessing. At the death of Mrs. Emerson’s son, William, the Ripleys took the Emerson children to live with them at the Manse. Ralph Waldo wrote some of his early poems there, as well as his first book Nature. He also wrote on the wall in the guest room called the “prophet’s chamber,” because of the many ministers who stayed there. These jottings are still there for visitors to squint at.
One reads: “April 5, 1825, peace to the soul of the blessed dead, honor to the living.”
In 1844, the Emerson children having scattered and the Rev. Ripley having died, the house was rented to Nathaniel Hawthorne. During his three-year occupancy he wrote Mosses from an Old Manse, and became a parent for the first time. His daughter, Una, cut her first teeth in this house.
In 1847, however, Rev. Ripley’s son, Samuel moved into the house from his home near the Lyman Estate in Waltham. Worn out with the task of providing for his family of eight and his boarding school of 15 boys, he anticipated Concord as a rest from arising daily at 4 o’clock and going to bed at midnight.
He had such a large brood. His granddaughter Mrs. Ames relates that by the time he had finished serving, the first to have had the meat and potatoes on their plates passed them back for more before he could even as much as look crosswise at his own fork! “Boys,” he would sigh, “Just let me take one bite!”
He lived there only a few months whereupon the burden of supporting the seven Ripleys by birth and the one by adoption fell to the capable Sarah Alden Ripley, one of the most brilliant women of her time. Despite the work of keeping house in those days for a large family she also tutored Harvard students, who, to mitigate their having failed in a course, covered up the purpose of their jaunts to Concord as “rusticating.”
The Ripley children, who were Mrs. Ames’ aunts and uncles, have often told her of how they used to sit on a winter’s night around the fireplace surrounded by closehorse [sic] draped with blankets which kept the heat inside and one airtight stove which sent some heat up towards the second, and, maybe the third floors.
In the 30 years in which the Ames family used the house as a summer home, it progressed to indoor plumbing with cold water. The only hot water Mrs. Ames ever had was what she heated on the wood stove. One or two electric connections were made, but most of the light was furnished by candles and kerosene lamps.
Even to the dishes and the furniture—some which is older than the house and the most modern of which except for a Morris chair or two, is of the 1847 vintage –the house remains as it was when first used.
Miss Elizabeth Ripley, Mrs. Ames’ aunt, had her residence in it before Mrs. Ames. The last year to see it opened in the winter was in 1887. It was during Miss Ripley’s tenure that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s own house burned. Mr. Emerson came to stay for a few months with Miss Ripley. Although two generations before the combination of an Emerson and a Ripley under the same roof resulted in marriage, the ancestral urge did not show itself in this case.
The Manse has only been opened to the public since 1934. Before that, however, when the Ameses maintained it as a summer home, persons who were “friends of friends” used to come and ask to see the house. “My husband used to say that I always was willing to show it to the opposite sex,” said Mrs. Ames, “While I said that he seemed quite pleased to show it to pretty women.” “Of all who come,” she continued, “Those most interested in Emerson were the Japanese.”