Built in 1770 for the Rev. William Emerson, the Old Manse faces you on Monument Street in Concord, Massachusetts. The house is notable for its literary associations and is open to the public as a nonprofit museum owned and operated by the Trustees of Reservations. Think of the Emerson family here: the elder Rev. William Emerson was town minister in Concord, served as chaplain to the Provincial Congress when it met here in October 1774, and later served as a chaplain to the Continental Army.
He watched the fight at the North Bridge — part of the Concord Fight — from his farm fields while his wife, Phebe Bliss Emerson, and their children witnessed that same fight from the upstairs windows of this very house. That grandfatherly connection reaches forward to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the transcendentalist writer and lecturer. The minister died in October 1776 in West Rutland, Vermont, while returning home from Fort Ticonderoga; his widow Phebe later remarried the Rev. Ezra Ripley, who succeeded him at First Parish Church.
Notice the Concord River just behind the property and the North Bridge next door, where Phebe Bliss Emerson watched the fight unfold from these upstairs windows.