Tourists in Our Own Backyard

On paper, we were very well qualified to have done this already.

But a funny thing happens when you live near somewhere people travel to see: it becomes the place you can visit any time. And “any time” has a way of slipping behind everything that actually has a date on the calendar.

So, for a little while this fall, we became tourists in our own backyard. Our date took us to Authors’ Ridge in Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson are buried. Familiar names, suddenly attached to very small, very human places. About the writers and the cemetery.

The things people leave behind

Look closely at the photographs. Around Louisa May Alcott’s marker are pencils, pinecones, stones and a pink rose. At Thoreau’s, more pencils lie among the roots and needles, beneath a little stone that simply says Henry.

I find the pencils especially moving. Such ordinary things, brought to the graves of people whose words have lasted so long. To me, they look like small thank-yous: your work reached someone. Someone is still reading.

Hawthorne’s marker has its own quiet simplicity. A rounded stone, a surname, sunlight and shadow. You can know a name for years and still feel differently about it when you stand in front of it, outdoors, at the scale of a person.

In our photographs, the trees still hold plenty of green. A little gold is beginning to show. The ground has its own autumn palette: brown needles, gray stone, moss, a bright flower. There is enough to look at before you read a single name.

Before the graves, there were evening walks

One of my favorite pieces of this place’s history is that the writers knew it as a place to walk. The National Park Service records that Emerson, Thoreau, and Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne enjoyed evening walks in Sleepy Hollow before it became a cemetery.

Before these woods held their graves, they held their evening walks.

That makes a date here feel part of a much older habit: going outside together, looking around, letting a familiar landscape give you something to think about.

Sleepy Hollow was dedicated on September 29, 1855, with an address by Emerson. Landscape architects Horace William Shaler Cleveland and Robert Morris Copeland planned paths and drives around the natural shape of the land, respecting its trees and plants. The Concord Free Public Library’s dedication exhibit describes that approach—and notes that the place already carried the name Sleepy Hollow before it was a burial ground.

It belongs to the nineteenth-century tradition of rural or garden cemeteries, where landscape and remembrance meet. The winding roads and wooded setting are part of the history you have come to see. Read about the landscape.

A little more of the neighborhood

Concord’s history reaches much further back than the writers. The Concord Museum identifies the area as the original homelands of the Nipmuc, Massachusett and Pawtucket tribal nations, and recognizes Indigenous people’s continuing connection to this land.

Nearby, the North Bridge holds another chapter: the battle of April 19, 1775. A visit to Concord can open onto many histories. Authors’ Ridge gave us plenty to notice on its own.

Something lovely, close to home

A date like this makes room for the people we are as well as the people we look after. I’m still a writer. Dad is still someone who loves ideas. And we are still two people who can go somewhere together and find things worth noticing.

I like that the visit didn’t need to be elaborate to be worth remembering. A nearby place, a little curiosity, a few photographs. There is a particular pleasure in finally doing the thing that has been waiting so close to home.

Three years was a long time to get around to it. I’m glad we finally went.